Microsoft’s new DirectX shader compiler (DXC) is based on LLVM and Clang, which has been traditionally a cross platform codebase, but became Windows-centric through COM, SAL, etc. used to support DirectX 12 shaders. Recently, Google listened (thank you!) to a number of requests from myself and others (here and here) to refactor the codebase to support Linux and macOS compilation.
I have been pursuing cloud based shader compilation for a while, in order to scale our very slow shader compilation pipelines to greatly improve developer iteration time. Running content pipelines on Windows-based virtual machines is not a feasible approach due to concerns of cost, maintainability, and robustness.
With Linux compilation support, it is now possible to run the DXC compiler within a Docker container, and scale it out in a Kubernetes cluster (like GKE).
Simplified Vulkan synchronization logic, written in rust.
Through many discussions about pitfalls and gotchas with Tobias Hector about Vulkan synchronization, it was pretty clear that there was an opportunity to simplify synchronization patterns into something more approachable and less error-prone. Tobias created a C++ implementation based on our discussions, and this library was used successfully on some of our internal projects at SEED (i.e. PICA PICA).
In an effort to make Vulkan synchronization more accessible, this library provides an efficient simplification of core synchronization mechanisms such as pipeline barriers and events.
Rather than the complex maze of enums and bit flags in Vulkan - many combinations of which are invalid or nonsensical - this library collapses this to a much shorter list of ~40 distinct usage types, and a couple of options for handling image layouts.
Additionally, these usage types provide an easier mapping to other graphics APIs like DirectX 12.
