Slang: Converting Thousands of Shaders for a Cross-Platform Renderer

Slang is a shader language from NVIDIA, developed by Khronos Group since 2024. It compiles a single source code into HLSL, SPIR-V, MSL, and other targets, and provides a C++ API for integration into the engine, module system, interfaces, and powerful Reflection API. Slang is already used in Counter-Strike 2, NVIDIA Omniverse and Autodesk Aurora.

We'll look at what Slang is, what tasks it solves, and consider the Reflection API and its practical application. I will also share my experience using Slang to convert several thousand GLSL shaders to HLSL when porting the engine to a cross-platform RHI.

I will show you the limitations you can face, how Slang shows itself on large volumes of shaders. Let's look at which scenarios this tool is best suited for. The talk is intended for developers working with graphical APIs or interested in cross-platform rendering solutions.