[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkanizing

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020, 11:21 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 7:15 PM Scheming Pony
> <scheming-pony at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Your flexible architecture could allow us to to OpenGL and Vulkan in
> parallel, with your current budget.
>
> yes, there's nothing that would not prevent that... other than we
> didn't apply for NLNet budget to do so.  we'd not *stop* someone from
> implementing an OpenGL library on top of the hardware - we'd welcome
> it.
>
> however i think such a person would find, particularly when it comes
> to the GL Shaders, that one of the prerequisites for having a
> successful OpenGL engine is: EXACTLY the same underlying shader engine
> as is found and required for Vulkan.
>

OpenGL requires an even more complex shader compiler because we have to
implement translation from GLSL to the IR as well as the IR to the output
binary. SPIR-V is much less effort to translate to the IR since it is
already partially compiled.

Jacob

>