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What he wrote was not just a devils advocate position. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Also his 'Horrors of SPIR-V' article a year later[0] which has t

What he wrote was not just a devils advocate position. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Also his 'Horrors of SPIR-V' article a year later[0] which has this conclusion: > I had a chance to work with SPIR-V rather intimately, and I’m becoming convinced that most of the defenders of this format (who like to criticize WGSL in turn) have little experience actually doing anything with it [...] I was one of them. SPIR-V is probably a good format for what it was made for: driver compilers. It’s not as good for the intermediate portable representations of your shaders. [0] http://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html http://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html > Apple's other stance, very strongly stated, was that no binary IR of any kind was acceptable, full stop. Very strongly stated /where/? I linked my source, in which kvark clearly stated two things (not as part of his 'devils advocate' position) that directly contradict your claim: > There is much more to it than just "Apple cannot do X" that often shows up. > the group agreed to [...] take the semantics of SPIR-V where it makes sense If there really is a source for it, I'd love to see it (genuinely).

modeless 3y ago
Clearly neither of those two things directly contradict my claim that Apple refused binary formats. It's weird that you would even say that. My source is I was in the meetings where Apple refused binary IR. Man, you're going to make me look up the meeting notes, aren't you? OK, I found what I believe are the most relevant meeting notes [1]. Unfortunately the meeting notes are not a straight transcript and not everything that was said is in there verbatim. There were also side discussions not captured at all. The meeting notes say "Apple would strongly prefer a text-based language to a binary one". This is really an understatement of their position on the matter, and the notes don't capture the most contentious arguments well. But you can at least see in the notes that Apple was arguing strenuously against binary formats generically, even more so than SPIR-V itself in this meeting, going as far as arguing that a hypothetical SPIR-V assembly in text format would be better than SPIR-V in binary form. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CmKo59tjZwmePVrFpHpIG0W5shKR_GOrnNuMStPCEko/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CmKo59tjZwmePVrFpHpIG0W5...
- int_19h 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was their rationale for that position?

modeless 3y ago

Clearly neither of those two things directly contradict my claim that Apple refused binary formats. It's weird that you would even say that. My source is I was in the meetings where Apple refused binary IR. Man, you're going to make me look up the meeting notes, aren't you? OK, I found what I believe are the most relevant meeting notes [1]. Unfortunately the meeting notes are not a straight transcript and not everything that was said is in there verbatim. There were also side discussions not captured at all. The meeting notes say "Apple would strongly prefer a text-based language to a binary one". This is really an understatement of their position on the matter, and the notes don't capture the most contentious arguments well. But you can at least see in the notes that Apple was arguing strenuously against binary formats generically, even more so than SPIR-V itself in this meeting, going as far as arguing that a hypothetical SPIR-V assembly in text format would be better than SPIR-V in binary form. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CmKo59tjZwmePVrFpHpIG0W5shKR_GOrnNuMStPCEko/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CmKo59tjZwmePVrFpHpIG0W5...

int_19h 3y ago
Out of curiosity, what was their rationale for that position?