DConf 2014 Day 2 Talk 3: Designing an Aurora: A Glimpse at the Graphical Future of D by Adam Wilson

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On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 00:22:39 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
>
> I think its a fine abstraction level, buffers and shaders are 
> not
> hard concepts at all. All api's that Aurora is going to be based
> on offers them as well as all modern gpu's support them. If
> shaders were written in a DLS then in the case where Aurora 
> needs
> to fall back to software rendering then they can be translated 
> to
> D code and mixed right in. When they need to be turned into some
> api specific shader then they could be translated at compile
> time(the differences should mostly just be syntax). If the DSL
> was a subset of D then that would simplify it even further as
> well as make the learning curve much smaller. Its a perfectly
> fine level of abstraction for any sort of graphics that also
> happens to be supported very well by modern GPU's. I don't see
> the problem.

You might want to look at what bgfx does: 
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx
It provides a shader compiler to various supported backends.

Abstracting shaders more or less mandates having a shader 
compiler from your language to graphics API out there. It does 
make an additional build step.
Compiling such a shader abstraction language at compile-time 
seems a bit optimistic to me.