shaders VS processing

It may be close to a technical impossibility, but the Circle compiler by Sean Baxter is attempting it. That's based on an aggressive "de-pointerization" (see [1] in particular for details). There's also academic work[2] to compile C++ to shaders. I agree that it's an open question how well that will work out.

Also as pointed out elsethread, now that buffer device address is starting to land, the friction to compile pointer-intense C++ code should decrease even more. These are exciting times!

[1]: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#approaching-circle-sha...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14682

You can use circle c++ shader https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders but it's limited to look linux afaik?

First we have Circle C++ shaders, which pretty much would tick all the boxes. Problem is it's closed source and only compiles host code on linux. Closed source isn't the biggest of issues actually, but prevents anyone from fixing the developers issue with interfacing with the windows ABI and getting the thing working on windows (which itself isn't something they are able to fix because windows doesn't provide the documentation to work with their ABI). However you could use it separately to compile your SPIR-V for windows since SPIR-V doesn't care about platform itself.

Yes, Vulkan GPU source is split, though technically in a way that makes it more similar to CUDA. Vulkan uses an intermediate format instead of consuming text code directly, meaning new features are easier to add and frontend code doesn't need to be passed to the vendors driver compiler. SPIR-V is like DXIL or PTX code for CUDA, basically LLVM IR for GPUs. The CUDA compiler compiles your device code into PTX code, and it's what enables you to have "non split" source code. There's even an option to have separate PTX code in CUDA. There are few projects that aim to bring Vulkan SPIR-V into source, including Rust GPU for rust (though it will still have to be in a separate file) and Circle C++ shader for C++.

My favorite use is putting user-defined attributes on data members, and using reflection to generate a UI to manipulate those values. I do it with these shadertoys:

https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#reflection-and-attribu...

Just mark your declarations up with custom attributes:

I'm confused what is novel about this paper. We already have unified shader programming with circle C++, with way more features, and instead of having an SPIR-V compiler, they made a source to source compiler... We have quite a few of those.

I think shader specialisation is handled pretty well in circle. Since you can essentially run arbitrary C++ code at compile time, selection and specialisation of a shader can even depend on hardware specific benchmarks. There is an extensive repo with examples here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders. One example decodes a sprite sheet stored as a png at compile time and creates a specialised compute shader for it. You can also easily implement a control UI based on reflection of uniform shader parameters.

There's a project doing something similar for C++ called Circle which is pretty incredible. In its core Circle is an extension of standard C++ which adds a ton of metaprogramming facilities and other productivity enhancing features, things the base language sorely lacks like full compile-time execution of regular C++ code which lets you do anything you can normally do from runtime during compile-time (including file I/O and networking), reflection, typed enums, pattern matching, hygienic macros, list comprehensions and language-native ranges, first class paramater packs and much more.

I use them to automatically generate an ImGui interface for controlling a shadertoy here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders/blob/master/README.md#user-attributes-and-dear-imgui

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I disagree. There are so many creative tools that are now online that you can access from your browser that were not envisioned in the original web. It is obviously true that not EVERY website is about creation (but to expect that seems unreasonable?), but even Wikipedia is a collaborative project.

Examples include products from big vendors like Adobe's Photoshop, to smaller products like SketchUp, to more indy generative art tools like https://processing.org and Strudel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924210).

Would processing[0] be a good fit? It's designed to be easy to use and learn but powerful enough for professional use. Very quick to get cool stuff moving on a screen and the syntax is Java with a streamlined editing environment.

[0] https://processing.org/

I would personally use the language Processing. It's the one I use the most. And it's relatively easy to start drawing text, squares, and do other kinds of things. (It's kind of like java, but without all the boilerplate code)

Processing (P5) had this: you can select any string of text in its IDE anl search for it in the docs, and if it's one of the built-in functions or constants it will open the associated static html page that came installed with the software, so no internet nor server required. And despite being offline you can still navigate the docs too. This feels a lost basic skill in static site generation these days.

It was the only creative coding framework that had complete, offline documentation like that at the time I might add. OpenFrameworks is still mostly autogenerated stubs for example.

IMO it was one of the things that gave Processing an edge in educational contexts over all alternatives. I was pretty sad to see p5.js not fully continue that tradition and require that you go online to read the docs, and that it's not a static website but that text is rendered with javascript when you open it (still complete and with examples though).

https://processing.org/

https://p5js.org/

Processing is very cool, especially if you like graphics.

https://processing.org/

Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping.

And it's not even their IDE. They just slapped some AVR compilers into Processing

https://processing.org/