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:

1. Download the Slang compiler libraries for your platform: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/releases/tag/v2025.16
2. Unzip the downloaded directory, and use its path as value to the SLANG_DIR environment variable: SLANG_DIR=/path/to/slang. Note that the variable must point to the root of the slang installation (i.e. the directory that contains bin and lib). 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.