Shader Interop

[gmodarelli]

Hello there, I don't think this is really an "issue", but I wanted to know if there are plans to introduce some form of shader interoperability between Zig and HLSL.

I haven't had a need for it until yesterday and my first idea was to declare structs and DEFINEs in a C header file and import it in Zig and include it into my HLSL shaders.

Any thoughts on it?
Thank you :)

[michal-z]

Hi!

Yes, that should work pretty well. I was using this technique in C++ projects: https://github.com/michal-z/ImageBasedPBR/blob/master/Source/CPUAndGPUCommon.h

You just need to be careful when it comes to offsets of particular struct fields. Sometimes you will have to add padding for C++ structs.

Please try it and let me know if you hit an issue - will try to help.

Thanks,
Michal

[gmodarelli]

Thanks for the link!

Absolutely, I'm already adding padding zig's structs so that I don't forget when I move them to HLSL 😄

I hope I can share something soon here as I'm working on a new sample!

[michal-z]

Great, can't wait!

[michal-z]

@gmodarelli Should I close this issue?

[garettbass]

I feel like we could pretty easily provide a generic type, e.g.

UniformStruct(struct { accum_draw_index: u32, mvp: F32x4x4 })

That would insert padding as needed to align with the GPU requirements.

[gmodarelli]

@gmodarelli Should I close this issue?

Yes, this can be closed.