Stuff like this is why I'm so excited about Zig :D (screenshot blatantly stolen from the spirv-backend channel on the Zig Discord) discord.com/channels/605... - ThreadSky

flohofwoe.bsky.social • 105 days ago

Stuff like this is why I'm so excited about Zig :D (screenshot blatantly stolen from the spirv-backend channel on the Zig Discord)
https://discord.com/channels/605571803288698900/1105621511915700316/1305135574738407426

Comments

kkukshtel.bsky.social•104 days ago

unrelated but - glad to see you here :)

selbstmut.bsky.social•27 days ago

Do people actually use non-shading languages on the GPU? There is Rust on the GPU, C++ on the GPU and now Zig on the GPU.

Why is it better than writing a 'real' shader language like GLSL?

hjvt.dev•27 days ago

For the same reason people were excited about the possibility of WASM being a viable alternative to JS.

selbstmut.bsky.social•27 days ago

WASM is not an alternative to JS.

WASM requires a lot of JS to even be able to do anything useful. It runs in an isolated environment and can only do something interesting by interoperating with JS.

hjvt.dev•27 days ago

That's not how it was marketed, though. Plus Interface Types are probably gonna arrive at some point, giving a way to interact with DOM directly.

flohofwoe.bsky.social•27 days ago

The language itself isn't the exciting thing IMHO, but if the same compiler can build both CPU and GPU code from the same sources then that opens up code-sharing and integration opportunities (e.g. even just simple things like sharing struct declarations between GPU- and CPU-side code)

flohofwoe.bsky.social•27 days ago

...at the end of that process, most of today's 3D API 'surface area' could probably disappear because a lot of that surface area is just concerned with describing what the data sent to the GPU looks like (but the CPU-side compiler already has that information for the most part).

selbstmut.bsky.social•27 days ago

That example can be achieved in different ways. E. g. Maybe a macro/reflection on the type could make the underlying GPU API call which describes the layout.

selbstmut.bsky.social•27 days ago

But I get the code sharing. The question is, how much code is effectively shareable.

flohofwoe.bsky.social•26 days ago

Everything in the shader binding interface: structs, texture, sampler, buffer bindings, vertex attribute declarations. This already makes a lot of the 3D API redundant (don't need 'shader objects', it's just functions. Don't need vertex layout description in the pipeline object...

flohofwoe.bsky.social•26 days ago

I already do most of that in the sokol-shdc shader compiler which also code-generated CPU target-language structs and constants that plug directly into sokol_gfx.h (or the varous language bindings), but it could all be much simpler if the shared CPU/GPU compiler directly sees those shared decls.

p1xelher0.com•105 days ago

I don't really understand but what is this? Some SPIR-V Vulkan but from Zig user space? Comptime magic!?

flohofwoe.bsky.social•105 days ago

It's a vertex shader written in Zig, compiled to SPIRV using the Zig SPIRV backend (probably 'offline' during the Zig build), and then loaded into Vulkan (the Discord thread says that the fragment shader is still regular GLSL).

p1xelher0.com•105 days ago

Thanks, cool!

srekel.net•105 days ago

Can this import zig stuff, so you can have for example common structs or functions defined in one place and not in both zig and hlsl?

flohofwoe.bsky.social•105 days ago

I think/hope so, but don't know if this is already working (and it might need some sort of packing rule attribute like std140 vs std430 - manual padding should work too of course but would be awkward).

srekel.net•105 days ago

It is pretty neat, I'm not sure how keen I am on writing shaders in Zig though... Like maybe if you're implementing PBR according to some spec, but if you're experimenting to make a nice effect (or as I currently doing compute) and you get hit with "error: local variable is never mutated" ...

tihan.bsky.social•103 days ago

It’s really cool to see upcoming languages do these kinds of projects. I love it.

zachstronaut.com•102 days ago

Lazy web… what is zig?

flohofwoe.bsky.social•102 days ago

A programming language: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/

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