shader-slang/slang

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

5580 stars · 482 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Slang is a shading language and compiler for building large, modular, high-performance GPU shader codebases. It compiles to D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, D3D11, CUDA, and CPU targets, and supports automatic differentiation and PyTorch integration via SlangPy.

Use cases

• write shaders once and compile to multiple graphics APIs
• migrate existing HLSL or GLSL shader codebases to a modular language
• add automatic differentiation to rendering code for neural graphics
• use shader code as GPU kernels in PyTorch training workflows
• precompile shader modules to IR and link at runtime
• manage GPU feature differences across platforms with a capability system

When to choose

• you maintain a large real-time graphics shader codebase needing modularity and portability
• you need one shader source targeting D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, and CUDA
• you are building differentiable rendering or ML-enhanced graphics pipelines
• you want readable generated code for textual targets like MSL and CUDA

When to avoid

• you only need a tiny one-off shader for a single API with no portability needs
• your team is fully invested in an existing HLSL/GLSL toolchain with no migration appetite
• you need a mature formal language specification - it is still a work in progress

Facets

library · maturity active

compiler programming-language graphics machine-learning sdk graphics machine-learning gpu-computing programming-languages compilers windows cpp python cross-platform shading-language hlsl glsl vulkan d3d12 metal cuda spirv automatic-differentiation shader-modules slangpy pytorch game-development linux macos gpu

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="shader-slang/slang")