GPU Programming and HLSL with Chris Bieneman

Jason and Mathieu are joined by Chris Bieneman to discuss GPU programming and the evolution of HLSL, the challenges of floating-point determinism on GPUs, and lessons from over a decade of shading language and compiler work.

News

• Sure, xor'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out, but why not sub? - Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing
• Preventing Integer Overflow in Physical Computations - Mateusz Pusz, mp-units
• Let's check vibe code that acts like optimized C++ but is actually a mess - Andrey Karpov, PVS-Studio

Links

• Developer Toolchain for the PlayStation 4 - Paul Robinson (2013 LLVM US Dev Meeting)
• HLSL: Decades in the Making - Chris Bieneman (Khronos Shading Languages Symposium 2026)
• GLSL: Origins, Observations and Opportunities - Randi Rost (Khronos Shading Languages Symposium 2026)
• Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI - Mark Russinovich & Scott Hanselman (ACM)
• Two Compilers, One Language, No Specification - Chris Bieneman (2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting)
• Ecma TC57 - HLSL Standardization Committee (GitHub)
• microsoft/hlsl-specs - HLSL Specifications (GitHub)