Hello all,

The HLSL compiler community is interested in contributing HLSL, DirectX and Vulkan graphics support to Clang and LLVM.

The existing HLSL compiler, the DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC), is a fork of LLVM/Clang 3.7 and is developed open source on GitHub (GitHub – microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler: This repo hosts the source for the DirectX Shader Compiler which is based on LLVM/Clang.) by Microsoft and a diverse community of open source partners. We plan to update our compiler to the latest LLVM. This plan is motivated by our efforts to bring new C++ language features and tooling improvements to HLSL.

While we could do this in our own fork, we believe that integrating our compiler and community with the LLVM community will allow us to expand both communities, and to deliver a better compiler for our users.

High Level Shading Language (HLSL) was introduced as part of DirectX 9 for programming the (then new) programmable parts of the GPU rendering pipeline. The language began as a C-like language and has developed over time to include more and more C++ features. The latest version of HLSL, HLSL 2021, has added C+±style templates, limited operator overloading, and bitfields (A