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

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.