Slang is a shading language that makes it easier to build and maintain large shader codebases in a modular and extensible fashion, while also maintaining the highest possible performance on modern GPUs and graphics APIs. Slang is based on years of collaboration between researchers at NVIDIA, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford, MIT, UCSD and the University of Washington.

The Slang shading language is designed to enable real-time graphics developers to work with large-scale, high-performance shader code.

The Slang compiler can generate code for a wide variety of targets: D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, D3D11, CUDA, and even generate code to run on a CPU. For textual targets, such as Metal Shading Language (MSL) and CUDA, Slang produces readable code that preserves original identifier names, as well as the type and call structure, making it easier to debug.

Slang code is highly portable, but can still leverage unique platform capabilities, including the latest features in Direct3D and Vulkan. For example, developers can make full use of pointers when generating SPIR-V. Slang's capability system helps applications manage feature set differences across target platforms by ensuring code only uses available features during the type-checking step, before generating final code. Additionally, Slang provides flexible interop features to enable directly embedding target code or SPIR-V into generated shaders.

Slang can automatically generate both forward and backward derivative propagation code for complex functions that involve arbitrary control flow and dynamic dispatch. This allows existing rendering codebases to easily become differentiable, or for Slang to serve as the kernel language in a PyTorch-driven machine learning framework via slangtorch.

Slang provides a module system that enables logical organization of code for separate compilation. Slang modules can be independently compiled offline to a custom IR (with optional obfuscation) and then linked at runtime to generate code in formats such as DXIL or SPIR-V.