Targeting Vulkan and SPIR-V

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 02:18 +0000, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> 
> Unlike LDC, GDC doesn't need to be *made* to target anything.  It's IR is
> high level enough that you don't need to think (nor care) about your
> backend target.
> 
> GCC itself will need a backend to support it though.  ;)

All Apple's effort will go into Clang, and I suspect they are one of the
driving forces behind Vulkan as they were the initiators and driving
force behind OpenCL. Thus LDC should be able to get all the work about
as "for free" as it gets. The question is whether NVIDIA and Intel will
put effort into GCC. If they do then GDC get this about as "for free" as
it gets. No-one other than the D community will do this for DMD.

It is not clear how quickly Vulkan compliant hardware will appear, a lot
faster than the compilers most likely, but they will get hamstrung with
OpenGL and OpenCL compliance – which may end up very annoying, albeit
necessary.

Also, of course, there is the huge problem of moving the AAA games world
over to all this.

So I suspect we have a few weeks of time (*) to mull over this before it
is all in everyone face. But I can see this being big because it is a
new thing that games and hardware manufacturers can use for marketing.
There is nothing so useful to marketing as something that is genuinely
new (**).


(*) well tens of weeks probably.

(**) OK so Vulkan is only new-ish, but the marketers won't care.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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