SPIRV-Cross VS rust-gpu

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.

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