GPU Programming and HLSL with Chris Bieneman

Jason and Mathieu are joined by Chris Bieneman to discuss GPU programming and the evolution of HLSL, the challenges of floating-point determinism on GPUs, and lessons from over a decade of shading language and compiler work.
News

• Sure, xor'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out, but why not sub? - Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing (devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260421-00…)

• Preventing Integer Overflow in Physical Computations - Mateusz Pusz, mp-units (mpusz.github.io/mp-units/HEAD/blog/2026/04/11/…)

• Let's check vibe code that acts like optimized C++ but is actually a mess - Andrey Karpov, PVS-Studio (pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1366)

Links

• Developer Toolchain for the PlayStation 4 - Paul Robinson (2013 LLVM US Dev Meeting) (youtube.com/watch?v=anPMIHA8FUY)

• HLSL: Decades in the Making - Chris Bieneman (Khronos Shading Languages Symposium 2026) (youtube.com/watch?v=4zVhKBLvP1o)

• GLSL: Origins, Observations and Opportunities - Randi Rost (Khronos Shading Languages Symposium 2026) (youtube.com/watch?v=km6JVauxyBg)

• Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI - Mark Russinovich & Scott Hanselman (ACM) (dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3779312)

• Two Compilers, One Language, No Specification - Chris Bieneman (2024 LLVM Developers' Meeting) (youtube.com/watch?v=sVq5khCXkbw)

• Ecma TC57 - HLSL Standardization Committee (GitHub) (github.com/hlsl-tc57)

• microsoft/hlsl-specs - HLSL Specifications (GitHub) (github.com/microsoft/hlsl-specs)