Microsoft has successfully promoted its DirectX back-end to an official target within the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The move, years in the making, enables the lowering of LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR) into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for use with Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers.
For the past four years, the DirectX back-end has been under development within LLVM, initially as an experimental target. It was not included in default LLVM builds. The change to official status was confirmed with a patch submitted by Microsoft HLSL compiler engineer Farzon Lotfi, who stated, “This change moves the DirectX backend out of experimental and adds the clang-dxc frontend so the community has a path to trying out the new backend.” The decision followed discussion on the LLVM Discourse platform.
Microsoft plans to continue enhancing the LLVM DirectX code. According to Lotfi, future work will focus on supporting graphics and ray tracing shaders, the newest Shader Models, and improving integration between Clang’s HLSL frontend and the backend Codgen. The company anticipates increased user feedback now that the backend is an official target and clang-dxc is enabled by default, which will aid in conformance and performance tuning.
The clang-dxc and HLSL support will be enabled by default starting with the LLVM 24 release next year.
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