RLSL Continues Maturing For Compiling Rust To SPIR-V For Use With Vulkan Drivers

One of the most passionate topics by readers in the Phoronix Forums is the Rust programming language. For about one year now "RLSL" has been in the works as a Rust-based shading language that can compile into SPIR-V. While initially I held off on writing about it to see if it would be just another small toy project, RLSL has continued maturing and seeing new functionality added in.

RLSL allows a subset of the Rust programming language to compile into SPIR-V, the intermediate representation used by Vulkan drivers (as well as OpenCL and OpenGL 4.6). This allows for Rust to be used in vertex/fragment/compute shaders and also still supports execution on the CPU. Rust's Cargo can also be used with RLSL.

Lead developer of RLSL, Maik Klein, promotes Rust as suitable for a shading language due to great tooling support, compiling to both CPU and GPU targets, generics/traits support, shared library support, and Rust's other fundamental advantages. Examples of a Rust (RLSL) shader can be seen here and here.

If you are a Rust developer and interested in potentially compiling code into SPIR-V shaders, learn more about RLSL on GitHub.