Ahjo.Vulkan.Slang.Native 0.12.0

Ahjo.Vulkan.Slang.Native

Raw P/Invoke bindings for the Slang shader compiler — compile Slang/HLSL to SPIR-V, plus the full shader reflection surface — with native runtime binaries included for win-x64 and linux-x64.

The managed surface is generated with ClangSharpPInvokeGenerator from slang.h at a pinned upstream release tag. Nothing is hand-written, so the bindings are a mechanical function of that tag.

Standalone. This package has no Vulkan dependency and does not reference Ahjo.Vulkan.Native or Ahjo.Vulkan — Slang takes shader text and produces bytes. Reference it directly if you need it.

using Ahjo.Vulkan.Slang.Native;

unsafe
{
    IGlobalSession* global;
    if (SlangApi.slang_createGlobalSession(0, &global) < 0) { /* handle */ }

    // Describe a SPIR-V target, create a session, load a module, find its entry
    // points, composite + link them, then getEntryPointCode() for the blob.
    // Every call that takes an ISlangBlob** outDiagnostics should be given one:
    // loadModuleFromSourceString signals failure by returning null, so a
    // result-code-only check will miss a broken compile.

    global->release();
}

Interface methods dispatch through delegate* unmanaged[MemberFunction] vtable slots — no ComWrappers, no [ComImport], no Marshal, no reflection — so the binding is Native AOT clean.

For an idiomatic wrapper over this (session objects, diagnostics as exceptions, reflection mapped onto DescriptorBinding / PushConstantRange / VertexAttributeDescription), see Ahjo.Vulkan.Slang.

What is and is not in the package

The shipped binaries are extracted from the official release archive for the pinned tag, after its SHA-256 is verified against a value pinned in this repository. Only the compiler and its SPIR-V optimizer ship:

slang-glslang provides the spirv-opt downstream compiler. Without it the compiler still emits valid SPIR-V — SLANG_TARGET_FLAG_GENERATE_SPIRV_DIRECTLY is Slang's own default — but every optimization level above "none" quietly reports error[E00100]: failed to load downstream compiler 'spirv-opt' and produces identical output, so the setting does nothing. It ships for that reason. The Linux file name embeds the version and is loaded by that exact name, so it is not renamed.

Left out deliberately: slang-llvm (152 MB, for CPU and host-callable targets), slang-glsl-module (GLSL input only), libgfx and libslang-rt (Slang's own graphics layer and CPU runtime — for running shaders, not emitting them), the slang-standard-module-* tree (the core module is embedded in the compiler binary), and the slangc / slangd command-line tools. The compile-to-SPIR-V path was verified end to end with only the files above present.

Platform support

Upstream publishes windows-aarch64, linux-aarch64, macos-x86_64 and macos-aarch64 assets, and this package ships none of them. That is not an oversight: a RID only ships once a CI lane has loaded its binary and compiled a shader with it. Add the lane first, then the RID.

Licensing

Slang is Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception (the Khronos Group / NVIDIA); its license text ships in this package as SLANG-LICENSE.txt. This package's own binding code is MIT, like the rest of the Ahjo.Vulkan repository.