Re:Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compi...
by flohofwoe on Monday May 19, 2025 @04:35AM
(#44027666)
AFAIK a very large part of Slang are massively big 3rd party libraries written in C++, the Slang-specific Rust code would just be a very thin layer on top of millions(?) of lines of C++ code that has been grown over decades and is maintained elsewhere.
(fwiw I've been considering to write the custom parts of the Sokol shader compiler in Zig instead of C++, but that's just a couple of thousand lines of glue code on top of massive C++ libraries (SPIRVTools, SPIRVCross, glslang and Tint), and those C++ APIs are terrible to work with from non-C++ languages.
As far as developer friction for integration into asset workflows goes, that's exactly where I would prefer Zig over Rust (but a simple build.zig already goes most of the way without porting any code to Zig).
(fwiw I've been considering to write the custom parts of the Sokol shader compiler in Zig instead of C++, but that's just a couple of thousand lines of glue code on top of massive C++ libraries (SPIRVTools, SPIRVCross, glslang and Tint), and those C++ APIs are terrible to work with from non-C++ languages.
As far as developer friction for integration into asset workflows goes, that's exactly where I would prefer Zig over Rust (but a simple build.zig already goes most of the way without porting any code to Zig).