Comment by MintPaw
9 days ago
If it weren't for the brand new shading language it might have been a step forward. But instead it's further fragmentation. Vulkan runs happily with GLSL, Proton runs HLSL on Linux, SPIR-V isn't bad.
And the new shading language is so annoying to write it basically has to be generated. Weird shader compilation stuff was already one of the biggest headaches in graphics. Feels like it'll be decades before it'll all be stable.
While I am also not happy with WGSL, note that GLSL has reached a dead end, Khronos officially isn't developing it any further other than extensions, see Vulkanised 2024 talks/panel.
Hence why NVidia's slang offer was welcomed with open arms.
Vulkan does not run GLSL. There are tools that convert GLSL to SPIR-V. That's not the same thing. So, if you want the exact same experience, you grab a tool, say, Slang, and have it output WGSL. Now you've got the same experience. An API that doesn't take a language you want to write in and a tool that converts from some language you do into the other.