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> OpenGL Shading Language is a high-level shading language with a syntax based on the C programming language. "high-level" and "based on C" in the same sentence? Something wrong isn't right.

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Sep 15, 2021

GLSL makes me so, so sad. Swizzling is pretty good, but beyond that it’s a consistent experience of “why would you make it this way? Who hurt you??” So I wrote an embedded Haskell DSL which compiles to it. Not a perfect solution, but it typechecks shader vars against buffers.

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Sep 15, 2021

(I also get free coordinate system checks, like if it’s in world space you have to give it a transform between that and screen space, which you can only obtain by composition step by step.)

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Oooh, reminds me a bit of "Geometry types for graphics programming":

dl.acm.org

Geometry types for graphics programming | Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

In domains that deal with physical space and geometry, programmers need to track the coordinate systems that underpin a computation. We identify a class of geometry bugs that arise from confusing...

11:43 AM · Sep 15, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

Thankfully we at least have SPIR-V so we don't need to compile to GLSL anymore. Direct to GPU, yayyy! (except on the web alas 😭)

Rob Rix‎

@rob_rix

Sep 15, 2021

Yeah targeting SPIR-V was TBD. Also I don’t think you can do that in OpenGL on a Mac, and I didn’t really care to go back and migrate everything to Vulcan.

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Honestly I think we shouldn’t talk about matrices in the context of graphics programming before we’ve talked about transforms-as-categories, or rather, -as-paths-between-frames-of-reference. The encoding as a table of numbers can come later. (In my uneducated & untested opinion.)

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Sep 15, 2021

Have you looked into geometric algebra before? It has some nicer properties than linear algebra, and could potentially work a bit better with this kind of thing.

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