[relssiegp]

I had the same thoughts about SIMD code being too verbose when I wrote some, so a few months ago I tried writing a library that lets you write quasi-GLSL code in C++, so much more compact, with the ability to switch between SIMD width without having to rewrite anything at all:

https://github.com/gitdepierre/cppshader

Not sure it will ever be useful, but it was a fun pet project with some interesting problems to solve.

[puilp0502]

Is GLSL more "approachable" than SIMD? For me personally (who doesn't have any graphics programming experience), GLSL feels way scarier than SIMD, especially when you look at the black magic that happens on shadertoys. Not saying GLSL is actually hard, but for a programmer like me SIMD might actually be more approachable

[relssiegp]

You're right, GLSL can be a bit confusing at first, especially swizzling, and the idea of writing your kernel only once then relying on the input data to drive your logic. But once you get used to it, it's very practical for writing complex stuff in just a few lines of code, it's really fun, and that's what you see a lot in Shadertoy.

I got the idea to write the library when I wanted a simplex noise function in C++, implemented with AVX2 for performance reasons (because why not). There were a lot of public HLSL/GLSL implementations that were concise and fast on GPU, some of which I had used for years for my own needs, but rewriting the whole code in plain C++ would have been a hassle, and i would have to do the same for every GPU code i came accross in the future, so building a wrapper seemed like the most efficient approach.

So in the end, the library is mostly aimed at people coming from the GPU world who want to keep most of their habits. But yeah, there is probably very few use cases for it.