Exploring rust-gpu Internals: MIR to SPIR-V + Debugging Questions

[nihalpasham]

Hi everyone,

I finally found some time to explore this project — rust-gpu has been on my to-do list for a long while! I recorded a (relatively) short stream where I dig into its internals, primarily to build a mental model of how the MIR → SPIR-V mapping works. I plan to make more of these as I continue exploring.

I’d really appreciate any corrections or feedback if I got anything wrong in the video.

Also, I have a question:

• Is there a way to directly supply some simple MIR (e.g., generated from simplest_shader) to rustc_codegen_spirv and breakpoint-debug the entire backend flow? The current examples use a build script that precompiles the backend and stores it in a known location, which makes breakpoint debugging the actual backend code quite difficult.
• If not, my plan is to manually compile a simple shader and invoke SpirvCodegenBackend::codegen_crate programmatically to trace the flow end-to-end during debugging. This should work -right?

YouTube link

Thanks in advance!