Why aren't there constantly more shading languages popping up all the time like other languages?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/GraphicsProgramming

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  • filament

    Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2

    There are a handful of other examples out there of high-level shading languages - Cg (long deprecated), whatever Filament Material system uses (example), and various GLSL preprocessors (example).

  • glsl-preprocessor

    A GLSL Preprocessor

    There are a handful of other examples out there of high-level shading languages - Cg (long deprecated), whatever Filament Material system uses (example), and various GLSL preprocessors (example).

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • slang

    Making it easier to work with shaders

  • SDL_shader_tools

    Shader compiler and tools for SDLSL (Simple Directmedia Layer Shader Language)

  • glassful

    Rust-like syntax for OpenGL Shading Language

  • xshade

    Discontinued "cross shade" meta shading language and compiler

  • rust-gpu

    🐉 Making Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for GPU shaders 🚧

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • cg2c

  • shady

    Research shading language IR

  • SPIRV-Cross

    SPIRV-Cross is a practical tool and library for performing reflection on SPIR-V and disassembling SPIR-V back to high level languages.

    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.

  • ssgl

    single source shaders for 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.

  • DirectXShaderCompiler

    This repo hosts the source for the DirectX Shader Compiler which is based on LLVM/Clang.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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