Slang Continues To Advance For Easing Shader Writing, Cross-Compiling Shaders

NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University continue working on the Slang project for providing improved functionality around existing Direct3D HLSL and OpenGL GLSL shaders as well as developing its own shading language.

Besides working on its own shading language that is inspired by Microsoft's HLSL, Slang allows cross-compiling shader code written in their language to HLSL, GLSL, DirectX bytecode, or SPIR-V. HLSL and GLSL code can also make easy use of Slang's libraries. When feeding HLSL or GLSL code into the Slang compiler, it can take care of some tedious steps of the shader writing process, full reflection information about parameters of the shader code, and various other helpers around graphics shader writing.

Slang's GLSL/SPIR-V focus is currently around Vulkan and at this stage does have some limitations with Slang 1.0 yet to be christened. The Slang project is under the MIT license. An example of the Slang shader language syntax can be found here.

If you are a developer and learning about Slang for the first time or haven't checked it out in a while, learn more at shader-slang/slang on GitHub.