SPIRV-Cross VS naga

There also exists something like SPIRV-Cross which promises to be able to generate code from the SPIRV intermediate representation into Metal and all versions of GLSL and HLSL. I am not sure really how good it is at this point, but going forward we might start to see more high-level shader languages, that compile to SPRIV and then from there to the myriad of different shader formats different platforms expect.

If you have shaders, I believe you can use SPIRV-Cross to generate GLSL, which you can probably get to pass as OpenCL C with just a bunch of macro tweaks, or at worst some small changes to spv-cross.

Regarding reflection, here is a guide: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross/wiki/Reflection-API-user-guide

I am working on an engine that targets Vulkan and Metal. I'm at the point now where I want to be able to dynamically update my shader at runtime to suit the type of data being sent in for drawing. I am currently using offline compilation for my GLSL (for Vulkan) and MSL (for Metal) shaders. What are your workflows for situations like this? For those using tools like SPIR-V Cross and shaderc, what has your experience been with these tools keeping up to date with the latest features in the specs?

For cross-platform support look at WebGPU and Vulkan (e.g,: [0] [1]. Essentially, you would need to write the func in WGSL or GLSL, HLSL or MSL. Each of these can be cross-compiled to SPIR-V (what Vulkan needs) with cross-compilers such as spirv-cross and naga.

Just for reference, the library I'm using (both for compiling the shaders and for reflection), is SPIRV-Cross by the Khronos Group and here you have the docs for the reflection API. I wanted to check out `glslang` but honestly this one so far has worked like a charm.

Aside from SPIRV-Reflect, if you're using SPIRV-cross to cross compile your shaders, there is also a --reflect arg you can pass which spits out reflection info in JSON format. We already need to cross compile from spirv, so it just removes a tool in the chain to depend on.

For your own engine, use the format your API uses. If you need crossplatformness, there is a new path available. Write your shaders in a language that compiles to SPIR-V (HLSL/GLSL are the most obvious languages), and then use SPIR-V Cross to compile the SPIR-V back to HLSL/GLSL for other API to consume.

That wouldn't have been all that different from WGSL though, the most important thing is that whatever WebGPU uses for its shaders can be translated to and from SPRIV (and WGSL does that too (e.g. via https://dawn.googlesource.com/tint and https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga).

Hey all, wanted to put this link in here, where I'm proposing changing the API for errors in naga, so Naga can take ownership of error presentation and actually Make Shader Compilation Messages Comfy™: https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga/issues/2317

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.

And it seems that naga https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga Already has a working front/backend for wgsl.

This is basically Ray Tracing support in Blade. So far, only ray queries are supported. Unlike prior work on ray tracing in Rust, this is original due to all shader code being WGSL, see the Naga PR.

There's a compiler that can translate from WGSL to SPIR-V called naga. Having such a compiler is essential, since WebGPU is planned to use WGSL and browsers are expected to implement rendering via Vulkan (and probably Metal and DX12).

Not sure about on the CPU, but naga is a shading language transpiler you can write custom front/backends for.

The spec docs are actually pretty useful https://www.w3.org/TR/WGSL/ besides that I was using naga's tests for reference https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga/tree/master/tests

For cross-platform support look at WebGPU and Vulkan (e.g,: [0] [1]. Essentially, you would need to write the func in WGSL or GLSL, HLSL or MSL. Each of these can be cross-compiled to SPIR-V (what Vulkan needs) with cross-compilers such as spirv-cross and naga.