DirectXShaderCompiler VS rust-gpu

> We may support DXBC generation in Clang in the future (we mentioned that in the original proposal to LLVM). That work is unlikely to begin for a few years as our focus will be on supporting DXIL and SPIR-V generation first.

I appreciate this quote[0] from the microsoft camp. Setting clear expectations that something will not be done is a nice bit of fresh air.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/issues/57...

There's no need for transpilers these days, you can just compile HLSL to SPIR-V bytecode with dxc.

https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler

Use DXC and only HLSL for your main shader editing.

You can see libdxilconv in there, DXIL is the DirectX Intermediate Representation, documented in the open source shader compiler from Microsoft.

BTW, this problem can be reproduced as described below: - clone https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan.git - build the project and run it with arguments : -v - s hlsl to enable the validation layer and to use hlsl code - run ComputeShader project. The following validation error "Type mismatch on descriptor slot ..." will be shown in the console. - to fix it, as suggested above, you can replace the 3rd line of emboss.comp, sharpen.comp, and edgedetect.comp from: Texture2D inputImage : register(t0); //Creates validation errors to RWTexture2D inputImage : register(u0); //no validation errors (you'll then need to recompile the shaders to spv with a proper hlsl compiler such as Microsoft dxc)

EDIT: There is also naga but it does not take HLSL as input: https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga but you can use DirectXShaderCompiler to compile to SpirV, then use naga to compile to Metal.

🤨 For a "refusal to acknowledge it", they do appear to have a rather sizeable document mapping between HLSL and SPIR-V? https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler/blob/main/docs/SPIR-V.rst

I am starting work on a compute-driven rendering engine, and it seems that the best way to go around it will be to write code in HSSL, and then use DirectXShaderCompiler to generate SPIR-V, and SPIRV-Cross to then generate MSL. And while DXSC's repo has a page on incompatibilities, no such resource seems to exist for SPIRV-Cross targeting Metal.

DirectX Shader Compiler

Sounds cool, but this requires yet another language to learn[0]. As someone who only has limited knowledge in this space, could someone tell me how comparable is the compute functionality of rust-gpu[1], where I can just write rust?

[0] https://github.com/Hugobros3/shady#language-syntax

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

I don't do anything related to data science, but I feel like doing it in Rust would be nice.

You get operator overloading, so you can have ergonomic matrix operations that are typed also. Processing data on the CPU is fast, and crates like https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu make it very ergonomic to leverage the GPU.

I like this library for creating typed coordinate spaces for graphics programming (https://github.com/servo/euclid), I imagine something similar could be done to create refined types for matrices so you don't do matrix multiplication matrices of invalid sizes

Do you mean rust-gpu?

And https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu/tree/main/examples with the wgpu runner (here it runs the compute shader)

I don't know how major they are considered, but Embark Studios is doing quite a bit of Rust in the open source space, most notably (IMO) rust-gpu and kajiya

The examples in the rust-gpu repository are a good place to start

There's another project that's similar that's being used by an actual game company: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

They see specific advantages here that would outweigh that negative. It's not my space (I play games, but know next to nothing about graphics programming), but there's at least one argument in the other direction.

Could this approach work for compute shaders (GPGPU) as well? So far, I think https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu is the state of the art in that area, but it adds a specific Rust compiler backend for generating SPIR-V rather than leaving that up to the driver. That seems more complicated than it needs to be... but maybe it has advantages too? Thoughts?

https://github.com/embarkstudios/rust-gpu Allows you to create shaders (kernals) in Rust.

Also Embark Studios (formers DICE people) is doing a lot of work with Rust, all open source like Rust GPU https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu