Show HN: Metashade – a Pythonic GPU shading/compute EDSL • Hacker News Board

I was using Taichi recently to prototype some fragment shaders (I just mocked out texelFetch, texture, etc and wrote a for loop over each pixel). I found it convenient to be able to run on the CPU and also not have to deal with any OpenGL or Vulkan setup.

One thing that was frustrating was that I couldn't template a function with another function (as far as I know). That lead to some copied and pasted code when I had multiple implementations that I wanted to compare. Can Metashade do that?

Re: Show HN: Metashade – a Pythonic GPU shading/compute EDSL

#77

Post by raytopia » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 12:50 AM UTC

Super interesting project. Been looking into template generation and uber shaders to make coding shaders easier for the game engine Ursina. I'm going to bring this to their attention.

Would it be easy to add another target like glsl?

Re: Show HN: Metashade – a Pythonic GPU shading/compute EDSL

#78

Post by pixelpoet » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 6:23 AM UTC

Hi Pavlo, nice to see you here and thanks for the presentation at Maxon :)

Re: Show HN: Metashade – a Pythonic GPU shading/compute EDSL

#79

Post by kookamamie » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 7:06 AM UTC

Wouldn't jinja templates would have sufficed for this? I'm not sure it's a good idea to create a whole new language just for getting templating capabilities to shaders.

Re: Show HN: Metashade – a Pythonic GPU shading/compute EDSL

#80

Post by ppenenko » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 4:49 PM UTC

pixelpoet wrote: post #78

Hi Pavlo, nice to see you here and thanks for the presentation at Maxon :)

Cheers Thomas!