{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/unified-shader-programming-in-c","title":"Supporting Unified Shader Specialization by Co-opting C++ Features","arxiv_id":"2109.14682","date":"2021-09-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kerry A. Seitz Jr.","Theresa Foley","Serban D. Porumbescu","John D. Owens"],"abstract":"Modern unified programming models (such as CUDA and SYCL) that combine host (CPU) code and GPU code into the same programming language, same file, and same lexical scope lack adequate support for GPU code specialization, which is a key optimization in real-time graphics. Furthermore, current methods used to implement specialization do not translate to a unified environment. In this paper, we create a unified shader programming environment in C++ that provides first-class support for specialization by co-opting C++'s attribute and virtual function features and reimplementing them with alternate semantics to express the services required. By co-opting existing features, we enable programmers to use familiar C++ programming techniques to write host and GPU code together, while still achieving efficient generated C++ and HLSL code via our source-to-source translator.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14682v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14682v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"unified-shader-programming-in-c","repo_url":"https://github.com/owensgroup/unifiedshaderspecialization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}