ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part discusses the workings of the current implementation. Shading (Sh) is open source and is intended to be both a useful graphics processing unit programming language for commercial applications and a research tool. The part also discusses the Sh Intermediate Representation. It explains how streams and textures are represented internally in Sh and how memory for these objects is managed. The part presents the current and potential future state of the Sh optimizer and discusses why particular optimizations are important for stream and shader programs. It provides an overview of the interface between the Sh frontend and the processor-specific backends, and discusses issues relevant to implementing a backend. The part discusses the current state of the Sh implementation, as well as future work that could be done to improve the implementation.
