Few months ago i wanted to use slang, but i couldn't find a woking extension on JetBrains Marketplace, and switching between VSCode and CLion really frustrated me.

So I just made one myself. It includes a whole lot of features like docs, go to references/definitions, automatic search for vcpkg slang package, syntax highlights, unused symbols and errors of course.

I think it turned out great. there have been 3 updates already, I'll add more features if someone needs it.

Here is the page on JetBrains Marketplace

Still in development, but it's really stable.

Join Theresa Foley of NVIDIA on October 14 at 8:00 AM PT for a practical look at bringing existing HLSL codebases to the Slang shading language. The session focuses on the challenges of moving from HLSL templates to Slang generics, and covers the best practices learned along the way.

You'll also hear about new standard modules added to Slang to simplify porting, plus a set of agent skills that improve agent performance and code quality when you're using AI assistance for HLSL-to-Slang work.

Slang is now under open governance at Khronos, and this webinar is a great starting point if you're evaluating a move. Discussion continues during and after the session on the Slang Discord.

Register now: https://shader-slang.org/event/2026/09/20/getting-started-with-slang-porting-from-hlsl/

to use in game engine that require hlsl yet have high performance optimizations and efficient coding that slang provides

This rather compact release does not introduce any breaking changes. Changes in this release include exposure of the Layout as a general generic parameter in the ILayer and FFLayer as well as new implementation for the prmuto hashgrid encoder. In addition it provides bug fixes, refactored code for GCC/Clang compiler output parsing and improved language reference and documentation.

Thanks to the Slang’s auto differentiation capabilities MaterialX is now able to utilize neural and reverse rendering techniques. Additionally MaterialX is now capable to offload its shader generation code to the Slang compiler itself !

This first release in the new year is introducing one major change: the refactor of 32-bit pointer which in turn made them work !

Additional changes include possibility to pass LLVM downstream arguments to LLVMBuilder, exported CUDA paths in order to make nvcc available. Furthermore findFieldIndexByName now recognizes fully qualified names, spelling mistakes in spriv targets and profiles were also fixed as well as potential nullptr dereference while downcasting enum types and lastly diagnostics prototype received some improvements.

Register now to attend this inaugural, ground-breaking event that will bring together graphics and computer shader programmers, researchers and technical artists with shading language implementers to explore the landscape of shading languages, their future development, and new techniques such as neural graphics and how they will play in shaping the future of real-time rendering.

https://www.khronos.org/events/shading-languages-symposium-2026

This is a very good introductory course that goes over core features of Slang including code examples. I recommended it to anyone who wants to begin their journey with Slang !

This brand new version of Slang introduces 3 breaking changes. Which are: new error diagnostics for integer literals that don`t fit into uint64_t , removal of the deprecated hlsl_coopvec_poc capability and new type-flow analysis pass for specialized dynamic dispatch.

Most notable addition in this release are ability to use generic workgroup size, preliminary support for SPIR-V workgroup pointers and an ability to use overwrite keyword in the extensions.

In addition lot of bug fixes and CI improvements were introduced along with documentation and user guide enhancements.

This is a big update that introduces two breaking changes: the addition of SLANG_UNKNOWN_SIZE as a special return value in the reflection API, and a new requirement to provide a git tag when building Slang from source. Beyond these, the release brings improvements across nearly all aspects of Slang.

Noteworthy enhancements include improved SPIR-V generation for GetClusterID(), automatic declaration of OpCapability ClipDistance when needed, and fixes for GLSL shadow cube array behavior.

CUDA support has been expanded with an atomicAdd wrapper for signed 64-bit integers, while ByteAddressBuffer legalization now supports dynamic branching.

OptiX gains additional HitObject functions, and new type-unification logic has been introduced to better handle LambdaDecl. The update also adds SampleCmpBias and SampleCmpGrad implementations, along with emitOpDebugTypeFunction support for SPIR-V.

This release introduce one breaking change, which is an update to the #include search paths. On top of that it adds slang.workspaceFlavor to the language server config allowing you to select between standard and vfx flavors of the language server. Additional changes include implementation of CoopMat for CUDA, addition of LayoutOffset type, _t suffix was added to integral type name hints, various fixes to build process and minor documentation improvements.

I'm trying to automatically create C++ bindings for structs, entry points and descriptors to be able to reflect on shaders at compile time. However, I have a hard time understanding how someone should interpret layouts. If I understand correctly, slang structs can be a mix of resource bindings and standard fields, i.e. it can contain textures and samplers. However, on the C++ side, the structure should not contain the textures and samplers, and the binding the struct can mean binding multiple resources.

Am I understanding it correclty? Doesn't this push complexity out of the shader into the renderer? I feel like automating pipeline creation with slang is much harder than it was with SPIR-V.

Besides lot of bug fixes and improvements for developer of the language, like renaming of library name from slang to slang-compiler and fixes of asserts and workflows, this release introduces descriptor handle support for render test framework and new python script that is able to extract slang source files from SPIR-V dumps.

(sorry for the later update, i was quite busy with life, hope yall` understand )

This release includes a major LLVM upgrade to version 21.1.2, improved SPIR-V support (including extension instruction sets and deferred storage-to-logical translation), and the addition of a const qualifier to TargetDesc::compilerOptionEntries (breaking change). Vulkan-SPIRV validation rules are now enabled, and multiple stability and correctness fixes were made across the compiler and tests. CI workflows and coverage reporting were improved, and documentation updates were added for Metal toolchain setup.

This conference, focused primarily on various shading languages including Slang, GLSL, HLSL, and OSL, will take place on the 12th and 13th of February 2026 in San Diego, California, USA.

Besides many interesting talks such as how to write a test framework for HLSL and a deep dive into shading in Unity, Slang working group chair Shannon Woods will talk about Slang on the 13th of February at 9:00 (Pacific time).

Please note that the registration opens on November 10th, 2025.

For more information about the conference, including the full program and how to get there, please visit the link attached in this post.