The bell it rang for me was [1], which has come up in discussions with Patrick Walton about maintaining a sort order for coarse rasterization in 2D vector rende

The bell it rang for me was [1], which has come up in discussions with Patrick Walton about maintaining a sort order for coarse rasterization in 2D vector rendering. Taking another look at that, it seems like they propose both bounded k-stacks and linked lists as solutions for recording all the fragments to be combined for transparency blending, but not the hybrid of the two. I wouldn't be surprised if that's been considered. The problem is slightly different, though, because the major focus for transparency is concurrent writing from potentially many different shaders, while in the stack case each thread can build its data structure without any concurrency or need for atomics; once an aggregate is built, it is "published" (see my prefix sum blog for details on that) and treated as immutable. These kinds of concurrent approaches do become important for later stages in the JSON parsing process, like building hashmaps for keys in a dictionary. I'm pretty sure the whole problem is tractable and have thoughts how to solve it, but deliberately kept the scope of this blog post limited, as I figured it was challenging enough. But it's very cool to reach people who appreciate the ideas, and if you find anything else that's relevant, I'd love to hear from you. [1]: https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S4385-order-independent-transparency-opengl.pdf https://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S43...