ShaderConductor

ShaderConductor is a tool designed for cross-compiling HLSL to other shading languages.

Features

Converts HLSL to readable, usable and efficient GLSL
Converts HLSL to readable, usable and efficient ESSL
Converts HLSL to readable, usable and efficient Metal Shading Language (MSL)
Converts HLSL to readable, usable and efficient old shader model HLSL
Supports all stages of shaders, vertex, pixel, hull, domain, geometry, and compute.

Note that this project is still in an early stage, and it is under active development.

Architecture

ShaderConductor is not a real compiler. Instead, it glues existing open source components to do the cross-compiling.

DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC) to compile HLSL to DXIL or SPIR-V,
SPIRV-Cross to convert SPIR-V to target shading languages.

Prerequisites

Git. Put git into the PATH is recommended.
Visual Studio 2017. Select the following workloads: Universal Windows Platform Development and Desktop Development with C++.
CMake. Version 3.20 or up. It's highly recommended to choose "Add CMake to the system PATH for all users" during installation.
Python. Version 3.6 or up. You need not change your PATH variable during installation.

Building

ShaderConductor has been tested on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

The script way:

  BuildAll.py <BuildSystem> <Compiler> <Architecture> <Configuration>

where,

<BuildSystem> can be ninja, vs2017, vs2019, or vs2022. Default is vs2022.
<Compiler> can be vc141, vc142, or vc143 on Windows, gcc or clang on Linux, clang on macOS.
<Architecture> can be x64 or arm64 on Windows, x64 on other platforms.
<Configuration> can be Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, or MinSizeRel. Default is Release.

This script automatically grabs external dependencies to External folder, generates project file in Build/<BuildSystem>-<Compiler>-<Platform>-<Architecture>[-<Configuration>], and builds it.

The manual way:

  mkdir Build
  cd Build
  cmake -G "Visual Studio 17" -T host=x64 -A x64 ../
  cmake --build .

After building, the output file ShaderConductor.dll can be located in <YourCMakeTargetFolder>/Bin/<Configuration>/. It depends on dxcompiler.dll in the same folder.

By setting some CMake variables, you can use a prebuilt DXC package. The building time is dramatically shortened by doing that. The SC_PREBUILT_DXC_DIR represent a local directory of prebuilt DXC. A more advance way is setting SC_PREBUILT_DXC_URL to an online DXC package URL. It'll be downloaded and extracted. Or you can simply set it to AUTO. Then predefined URLs for Windows x64/arm64, Ubuntu 20/22 x64, and macOS x64 will be used.

Artifacts

You can download the prebuilt binaries generated by CI system. Currently, artifacts for Windows, Linux, macOS are published every commit.

License

ShaderConductor is distributed under the terms of MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Code of Conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

gongminmin/ShaderConductor