| Authors | Hugo Devillers , Matthias Kurtenacker , Richard Membarth , Stefan Lemme , Michael Kenzel , Ömercan Yazici , Philipp Slusallek |
| Conference | HPG 2025 |
| DOI | 10.2312/hpg.20251167 |
| Published | June 2025 |
Graphics APIs have traditionally relied on shading languages, however, these languages have a number of fundamental defects and limitations. By contrast, GPU compute platforms offer powerful, feature-rich languages suitable for heterogeneous compute. We propose reframing shading languages as embedded domain-specific languages, layered on top of a more general language like C++, doing away with traditional limitations on pointers, functions, and recursion, to the benefit of programmability. This represents a significant compilation challenge because the limitations of shaders are reflected in their lower-level representations. We present the Vcc compiler, which allows conventional C and C++ code to run as Vulkan shaders. Our compiler is complemented by a simple shading library and exposes GPU particulars as intrinsics and annotations. We evaluate the performance of our compiler using a selection of benchmarks, including a real-time path tracer, achieving competitive performance compared to their native CUDA counterparts.
@inproceedings{devillers2025vcc,
author = {Devillers, Hugo and Kurtenacker, Matthias and Membarth, Richard and Lemme, Stefan and Kenzel, Michael and Yazici, Ömercan and Slusallek, Philipp},
address = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
booktitle = {Symposium Papers of the High-Performance Graphics (HPG)},
title = {No More Shading Languages: Compiling {C++} to {Vulkan} {SPIR-V}},
pages = {1--10},
year = 2025,
month = jun,
date = {2025-06-23/2025-06-25},
doi = {10.2312/hpg.20251167},
organization = {The Eurographics Association},
}