[montebicyclelo]

As a hobbyist, shaders is up there as one of the most fun types of programming.. Low-level / relatively simple language, often tied to a satisfying visual result. Once it clicks, it's a cool paradigm to be working in, e.g. "I am coding from the perspective of a single pixel".

[lukan]

I found them fun once they work, but if something did not work, debugging them I did not enjoy so much.

[jangxx]

Nothing like outputting specific colors to see what branch the current pixel is currently running through. It's like printf debugging but colorful and with only three floats of output.

[thegrim33]

Well in the GL/Vulkan world there's finally functionality now in recent years for printf output from shaders, which finally fixes the issue. I'd assume DirectX probably also has something similar but I don't work with it so I don't know.

[lukan]

Hm .. I just have limited experience with WebGPU so far, but since that is still highly unstable and I really would like a printf functionality and all of the performance possible, I guess I should rather invest all my learning efforts towards Vulkan. Thanks for the hint.

[FormFollowsFunc]

I agree it’s very difficult to debug them. I sometimes rewrite my shaders in Vex and debug them in that. It’s a shader language that runs on the CPU in Houdini. You can output a value at each pixel which is useful for values outside the range of 0 to 1 or you can use printf(). I’m still looking for something that will transpile shaders into JavaScript.

[bathtub365]

It’s interesting that this hasn’t been solved for pixel shaders. With HIP in the GPGPU world I’m able to set breakpoints in a GPU kernel and step through line by line. I can also add printf statements to output values to the console.

[0xf00ff00f]

You can do all that with Vulkan and RenderDoc.