slang-hal
| Crates.io | slang-hal |
| lib.rs | slang-hal |
| version | 0.1.1 |
| created_at | 2025-09-20 08:52:43.696451+00 |
| updated_at | 2025-09-20 09:29:42.024765+00 |
| description | Abstractions for running Slang shaders with Rust. |
| homepage | |
| repository | https://github.com/dimforge/slang-hal |
| max_upload_size | |
| id | 1847547 |
| size | 118,670 |
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README
slang-hal - A hardware abstraction for Slang
The slang-hal library provides abstractions for running slang shaders on any platform supported by the slang compiler.
Warning slang-hal is still very incomplete and under heavy development and is lacking a lot of features and backends.
Using Slang
In order to compile and run any slang project, be sure to define the SLANG_DIR environment variable:
- Download the Slang compiler libraries for your platform: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/releases/tag/v2025.16
- Unzip the downloaded directory, and use its path as value to the
SLANG_DIRenvironment variable:SLANG_DIR=/path/to/slang. Note that the variable must point to the root of the slang installation (i.e. the directory that containsbinandlib). We recommend adding that as a system-wide environment variables so that it also becomes available to your IDE.
Supported backends
slang-hal exposes a unified API for interacting with the GPU in a backend-agnostic way.
| Backend | Shader compilation | Compute pipelines | Render pipelines | Buffer read/write | Non-Pod types | Indirect dispatch | GPU timestamps | Link-time specialization |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WebGpu | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Cuda | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Vulkan | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Metal | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| DirectX | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| CPU | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| PyTorch | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| OptiX | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| OpenCL | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
Other features
slang-hal also provides utilities for:
- Writing device-side gpu code in a backend-agnostic way, with the ability to reuse the same code on multiple backend even within the same executable.
- Sharing Slang shaders across Rust crates (directly through
cargo. No need to deal with include paths). - Checking slang shader validity at compile-time (i.e. when running
cargo build,cargo check, etc.) - Generating boilerplate and helper functions for loading a shader from Rust and launching its compute pipeline.