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I kinda understand what OP want to say here: This work is IMO pretty valuable from an engineering perspective or as a generic project. But academic is an specia

I kinda understand what OP want to say here: This work is IMO pretty valuable from an engineering perspective or as a generic project. But academic is an special (if not slightly weird) place -- an academic paper usually needs to demonstrate strong novelty (or extreme novelty if your reviewers are picky) on its idea. When you see the paper from this angle, it doesn't make significant difference from previous unified shader programming idea. In short, "creating something high quality using existing ideas" is usually pretty hard to get you a solid accept in tier 1 PL conferences. Don't get me wrong, this very point is also my biggest disappointment on academic area: I absolutely appreciate their breakthrough on new knowledge, but the fact that they underestimate some of engineering works that truly help our daily life just really piss me off.

KerryASeitzJr 5y ago
Hi, lead author here. Thanks for your kind words on the value of our work! This work is definitely more on the practical or engineering side of things, and we believe it has significant research value as well. Our work echoes motivations from prior works, but the choice to target C++ and its limitations represents a fundamental difference compared to prior works that instead use uncommon/new languages with expanded feature sets. We believe that the synthesis of ideas from prior work, combined with our implementation strategy of co-opting existing language features, allows us to create a cohesive, C++-based system that is a novel contribution to the field. Nevertheless, these types of "systems" papers are sometimes challenging to review, especially if reviewers are unfamiliar with systems research. The novelty comes from the act of building the system---it lets us see what "just works," see what doesn't (e.g., shader specialization in this case), and figure out solutions to the challenges that arise along the way. I think Kayvon Fatahalian of Stanford University does a fantastic job of illustrating the value of systems papers here: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/ and the structure of our paper is certainly influenced by this philosophy.

KerryASeitzJr 5y ago

Hi, lead author here. Thanks for your kind words on the value of our work! This work is definitely more on the practical or engineering side of things, and we believe it has significant research value as well. Our work echoes motivations from prior works, but the choice to target C++ and its limitations represents a fundamental difference compared to prior works that instead use uncommon/new languages with expanded feature sets. We believe that the synthesis of ideas from prior work, combined with our implementation strategy of co-opting existing language features, allows us to create a cohesive, C++-based system that is a novel contribution to the field. Nevertheless, these types of "systems" papers are sometimes challenging to review, especially if reviewers are unfamiliar with systems research. The novelty comes from the act of building the system---it lets us see what "just works," see what doesn't (e.g., shader specialization in this case), and figure out solutions to the challenges that arise along the way. I think Kayvon Fatahalian of Stanford University does a fantastic job of illustrating the value of systems papers here: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/~kayvonf/notes/systemspaper/ and the structure of our paper is certainly influenced by this philosophy.