Top all-time · #8197
Moonside Games
Company blog · moonside.games/postsprogramminggames
Moonside Games is the company blog at moonside.games, writing about programming and games. Since 2024, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link these posts to explain SDL3_GPU's design: buffer cycling, why shaders are supplied per backend, and how the API differs from a proposed no-graphics-API design.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-03
- /posts/sdl-gpu-concepts-cycling/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-30
What Hacker News says?
If you look at the details you can clearly see SDL3_GPU is wildly different from this proposal, such as: - It's not exposing raw GPU addresses, SDL3_GPU has buffer objects instead. Also you're much more limited with how you use buffers in SDL3 (ex. no coherent buffers, you're forced to use a transfer buffer if you want to do a CPU -> GPU upload) - in SDL3_GPU synchronization is done automatically, without the user s…
Comment linking /posts/sdl-gpu-concepts-cycling/
on “No Graphics API”Submitted Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation as a story · 91 points
HN discussionThe current SDL GPU API does not intend to use this shader language. Instead, users are expected to provide shaders in the relevant format for each underlying graphics API [1], using whatever custom content pipeline they desire. One of the developers made an interesting blog post motivating this decision [2] (although some of the finer details have changed since that was written). There is also a "third party" solut…
Comment linking /posts/layers-all-the-way-down
on “SDL3 new GPU API merged”Submitted Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis article from the main author of the API describes how the buffer cycling works: https://moonside.games/posts/sdl-gpu-concepts-cycling/
Comment linking /posts/sdl-gpu-concepts-cycling/
on “SDL3 new GPU API merged”Submitted Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Stop Making Threads as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Archetypal ECS Considered Harmful? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Layers All the Way Down: The Untold Story of Shader Compilation as a story · 1 points
HN discussion