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Hi, lead author here. The Circle compiler is certainly some great work! We cite it in Section 7 of our paper. The ability to compile C++ code to GPU-executab

Hi, lead author here. The Circle compiler is certainly some great work! We cite it in Section 7 of our paper. The ability to compile C++ code to GPU-executable kernels for use in shader programming is a massive undertaking, and we're glad that the Circle compiler is working to accomplish this task! Instead, our work focuses on the next layer: once we can generate both host- and GPU-compatible shader code from C++, what else is required to achieve useful unified shader programming? Our work identifies shader specialization as a major missing piece when attempting to unify host and GPU shader code into C++. For reasons we discuss in the paper, current methods available in C++ to potentially support GPU code specialization are insufficient, and Circle does not add any language design provisions to allow dynamic logic in host code to influence compile-time specialization and selection of GPU code, which is central to supporting unified shader specialization. Our work aims to provide this support by co-opting C++ attributes and virtual functions. Circle also adds other language features on top of C++, including some interesting new metaprogramming features. It may be possible to build a unified shader programming system using these new features, but since these new features are not part of C++, they would not allow us to meet our design goals. The end of Section 7 in our paper includes an expanded discussion of this topic. I'm happy to answer any questions and have further discussion here!

orbifold 5y ago
I think shader specialisation is handled pretty well in circle. Since you can essentially run arbitrary C++ code at compile time, selection and specialisation of a shader can even depend on hardware specific benchmarks. There is an extensive repo with examples here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders. One example decodes a sprite sheet stored as a png at compile time and creates a specialised compute shader for it. You can also easily implement a control UI based on reflection of uniform shader parameters. Anyways I understand that under different constraints (adherence to C++ standard, can't easily implement a whole C++ frontend and interpreter) this becomes much harder.

orbifold 5y ago

I think shader specialisation is handled pretty well in circle. Since you can essentially run arbitrary C++ code at compile time, selection and specialisation of a shader can even depend on hardware specific benchmarks. There is an extensive repo with examples here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders. One example decodes a sprite sheet stored as a png at compile time and creates a specialised compute shader for it. You can also easily implement a control UI based on reflection of uniform shader parameters. Anyways I understand that under different constraints (adherence to C++ standard, can't easily implement a whole C++ frontend and interpreter) this becomes much harder.