vulkan-guide VS SPIRV-Cross

I totally agree, and so do the people working on it as well as some of the volunteers who write tutorials.

There's an ongoing effort to create beginner friendly introductory material which was discussed in the recent Vulkanised conference. And an effort to make a better documentation site that's easier to browse than the specification.

On the volunteer front, there's a Vulkan 1.3 -based introductory tutorial (work in progress) over at https://vkguide.dev/

I think there should be a Vulkan tutorial that doesn't start with the boring stuff of initialization and window creation. It's stuff that you write once and forget about, and nothing particularly interesting happens in it.

Looking at my hobby project, excluding the boring stuff (which is reusable), a "hello compute" example is around 100 LOC and a "hello triangle" around 120 LOC. GLSL shader sources included.

Maybe someday I'll get around to writing a "learn Vulkan the hard way" blog post with examples.

Also, use https://vkguide.dev/ rather than vulkan-tutorial.

Once you're beyond the "introductory" phase, resources become more specialized based on what you'd like to learn -- there are Vulkan tutorials like https://vkguide.dev/ which will teach you the API and also give a bit more insight in how modern GPU hardware is structured, there are books like the "GPU Zen" series that do deep-dives on specific techniques, and there are tons of recorded GDC and SIGGRAPH talks on interesting new techniques. :)

Personally, I'm a hands on learner who actually wants to use this stuff in my career, so I'd recommend these tutorials: https://learnopengl.com/ https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Overview https://vkguide.dev/

vkguide teaches some good practices regarding code/renderer structure, but I'm afraid it doesn't go as deep as you'd like. It's certainly deeper than most other tutorials, though.

https://vkguide.dev/ This is my favorite.

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.