Some slang-rhi questions

[LouChiSoft]

Hi, I have some slang-rhi questions. Since there isn't a discussion board in the rhi repo and there is an issue to have it merged to this one at some point I figured I would ask the questions here.

• Is there an estimated time for when the new RHI will be ready to use?
• What sort of GPU-driven rendering techniques will be supported? E.g. bindless rendering
• Are the docs going to be more comprehensive than the current gfx docs? The gfx docs are a good starting point, but more advanced topics and examples would be appreciated
• Have you considered adding integration for popular windowing libraries? I've seen from the example you use a glfw window and get the underlying handles for things when you want to interact with slang-rhi. But it would be much appreciated if you could pass something like a glfwWindow directly or an SDL_Window and have the rhi layer handle it for you.

Not entirely related to rhi directly, but I was also wondering if slang has been looking at cross platform work graphs, etc.

[Please-just-dont]

@LouChiSoft I'm not involved in this project and know less than you about it, but by RHI do you mean something like SDL_GPU or WebGPU or any of the other rendering abstractions? If so, aren't there already too many of those?

There's also BGFX and NVRHI which is NVidia's one.

[LouChiSoft]

Yes, slang-rhi is a like SDL_GPU and can be found here: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang-rhi and is meant to be replacing the outdated slang-gfx layer.

[Please-just-dont]

OK. Do you know how it works? Is there any instruction on how to use it?

[LouChiSoft]

Only what's in the example and docs folder in the repo, other than that no

[jhelferty-nv]

@LouChiSoft slang-rhi is already used internally by slang-test, as well as by SlangPy. If you're curious about how to use it, you might take a look at the SlangPy source code, in the src/sgl subdir.

(I'm a bit new to the project, so that's the extent of my knowledge. I'm unaware of any plans regarding slang-rhi beyond its current usage.)

[jkwak-work]

Slang project has slang-rhi in order to use it for testing purpose.
We also use it to implement experimental rendering features that may or may not be available on other RHI libraries.

We like to encourage people to use slang-rhi as their rendering framework.
It should be generic enough to be used as any rendering application.
If you happen to encounter any bugs or issues, please upstream fixes for them and we will be happy to review and merge.