ssgl VS glbinding

It's here. I made a post about it too, there's some details in the comments on how this works.

Here I'm doing GLSL and running it via OpenGL on top of my own helper library (the main branch of the code repo explains it pretty well). For me it's the easiest way to code for a GPU by a wide margin, but I guess that's to be expected. For performance, the most important things here are using shared memory and persistent threads so there are less global reads and especially atomics (I wanted to do a local reduction on the end result but for whatever reason subgroup operations don't work on 64-bit integers and I didn't bother to write it out with shared memory)

Some of it is fine-grained control, some is how it’s nice to be able to treat shaders as separate entities, some is just different preference. But no actual limitation, in fact I built a thing for that on top of OpenGL.

Include is probably your best bet there. Personally I use this system that I made, which borrows the single source programming model from CUDA so that shaders are just reinterpreted C++ code that can sit within the rest of the program. This means I can call the same functions from C++ and the shaders, and includes work just like any other includes.

I also already have a library that gives compile time errors, by having the shaders just be a part of the C++ program :) This would also benefit slightly from having embedded files, as I wouldn't need to do the runtime hacks that are currently in place.

As a side note, you may be interested in this library that someone posted on /r/GraphicsProgramming awhile ago. Haven't used it, but it seems like it might fit in with your general design philosophy.

Because mine is the most faithful reproduction of GLSL I've seen. Almost all features work the same in C++ as they do in shaders -- the notable difference is that you can't pass swizzles by reference, and inout arguments have to be defined with a slightly wonky syntax.

The culmination of my attempts at wrapping OpenGL is ssgl, which foregoes basically all binding and lets you write shaders along C++ with semi-automatic lambda capture. The underlying implementation is filled with dragons, but from personal experience it's just bonkers how much nicer it is to work with compared to any other approach I've used.

I have a library that due to its nature (it defines a domain-specific language within C++) has to define macros for a bunch of words that some standard headers use as variable names. This causes the standard headers to completely break if my library headers are included before them, and the errors are less than intuitive. Is there a simple way to produce a meaningful error (like "library header must be included last") if a standard header is included after the library headers? Googling didn't help much, and at a quick glance standard headers don't appear to contain too many extremely common names that I could #define to static_assert or something. I'm fine with the sensible error being limited to a few of the big standard implementations, so the option of just going through the headers and finding enough such names is doable, but it'd be nice to have a cleaner solution.

Yeah, the state machine aspect does make debugging cumbersome, and it's very easy to forget some option in the wrong setting. But I don't fully agree with "a collection of spells", I think the steps to achieve something are (mostly) pretty straight forward. Though maybe memories go sweeter with time, I haven't written any binding code after making ssgl :-)

Ever heard of https://glbinding.org ?

You should checkout glbinding, it might give you some ideas for your own wrapper.

I have based my career on top of C++/backend/soft-real time systems.

I still have to read the full paper, thanks for the post!

Many people rant about C++, but, IMHO, overall, taking into account ecosystem, tools, etc. C++ stands as an almost unbeatable technology when you put everything together. It has quirks, asymmetries and all of that.

But since C++11 it is nicer to use and all the standards after it have been improving on it: generic lambdas, structured bindings, string non-template parameters, constexpr and consteval... it is amazing what you can do with C++ that is difficult or almost impossible to do with other languages.

On the missing pieces I would mention that you need to use macros to have some kind of reflection for members and pattern matching and networking would be really nice to have.

Modules are still an experiment implementation-wise, but hey, they will improve on the side of hiding implementation details by a big margin.

As for the ecosystem, nowadays you have CMake (whose language sucks badly) and Meson. Together with Conan things have improved a lot since I started coding in around 2001.

Pack that with an IDE like CLion or Visual Studio + Resharper or lightweight IDE (Emacs + Lsp and the like) and you have an environment that is very competitive and whose code can be compiled almost anywhere. From ARM to x86, MIPS and even Webassembly.

That is why I think C++ is still the way to go if what you want is performance: you also have interfaces such as OpenCL/GL/Vulkan/SIMD libraries (though not C++ standard) where you can access hardware. Also, vendors and open source have things such as https://github.com/cginternals/glbinding