Khronos Group takes over cross-platform Slang shading language from NVIDIA

Interesting industry news here for you, especially for developers. The Khronos Group announced they've launched the Slang Initiative, taking over the Slang shading language supported by NVIDIA since 2017.

No longer being tied to a single graphics vendor, instead under the wing of the multi-company governance at Khronos, means it can truly be a proper modern open standard for everyone.

Slang is supported across "D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, D3D11, OpenGL, CUDA, and even generate code to run on a CPU. For textual targets, such as Metal Shading Language (MSL) and CUDA".

Some choice quotes from the press release:

“Slang is now a significant shading language option for graphics developers everywhere, as all are enabled to directly influence and participate in its ongoing development,” said Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group and vice president developer ecosystems, NVIDIA. “Khronos’s innovative Slang governance structure blends open-source development agility with the patent safeguards of open standards. Slang is freely available for any platform or API to use, including Khronos, which will leverage Slang in the Vulkan ecosystem while ensuring SPIR-V remains responsive to Slang’s requirements."

“NVIDIA will continue its longstanding investment in Slang, which is designed to meet the needs of today’s graphics developers while paving the way for the neural graphics revolution,” said Nicholas Haemel, vice president of graphics and system software, NVIDIA. “With Slang in open governance at Khronos, the graphics community can collaboratively advance and harness the advantages of cross-platform support, scalable graphics systems, reduced compile times, and enhanced modularity.”

“The process of getting our large HLSL shader codebase working with Slang went extremely smoothly. We were able to integrate Slang into the Source 2 engine and ship the generated SPIR-V into production on multiple titles, including Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, with minimal changes to our shaders. After completing the initial integration, we have since adopted some of the advanced features of Slang, such as BufferPointer, enumerants, interfaces, and generics. We are very thankful for NVIDIA offering Slang to the open-source community and believe ongoing contributions from multiple companies within Khronos will help ensure a healthy future for Slang,” said Dan Ginsburg, software developer, Valve.