Vulkan and DirectX could already share shaders, because the input for both was already HLSL. The difference is the intermediate representation of the compiled shaders that will now be the same in the future (SPIR-V for both).

The real winners here are driver programmers at NVIDIA/AMD/Intel, since they will no longer have to develop support for both DXIL and SPIR-V (which are similar in concept but different in implementation). How much of that will be true in practice remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.

There are tools to analyze, process and transform SPIR-V bytecode already, presumably those will work for DX12 shader model 7 too. It might make performance analysis easier, same with debugging via a tool like RenderDoc that supports SPIR-V but not DXIL.

As for the overhead of DirectX, with DX12 this is largely not true anymore, both are high performance APIs with comparable overhead (i.e. as little as possible).

I remember your previous post, congrats on not giving up.

Whipping up a script to solve a very specific problem is super satisfying, but I found that anything you write quickly becomes a liability. Debugging Perl can be super difficult, especially when returning to something you wrote a while back.

Personally I grew tired of the punishment and left it all behind! If I need a quick script I’ll use Python instead, and if it doesn’t work I can use a real debugger to fix it.

In any case it’s always fun learning new things, I hope this experience ends up being useful to you in the future and you get to easily solve a problem that stumps everyone else involved.

Cheers!

some people on IRC

Well there’s your problem! (just kidding)

Honestly though I don’t know why you would pick Perl unless you want to learn an obscure language that is both painful to read and write. May $deity have mercy on your soul.