The Slang Shading Language VSCode Extension

This is the official Visual Studio Code extension for the Slang shading language. Powered by the Slang shader compiler, this extension provides accurate coding assist for both Slang and HLSL.

Both Slang and this extension are open source projects on GitHub. We welcome feedback and contributions. Please report issues or suggest improvements at the github issue tracker. If your suggestion involves playground features, please instead report them on the slang-playground repo.

Features

This extension provides the following assisting features:

• Enhanced semantic highlighting: user-defined types, variables, parameters, properties and macros will be highlighted.
• Code completion: show context-aware suggestions of variables, functions, types, members, keywords, attributes, HLSL semantics, and include/import paths.
• Function signature help: view function signatures at call sites.
• Hover information: displays the signature and documentation for the symbol that your mouse is hovering over.
• Go to definition: jumps to the source location that defines the current symbol.
• Document symbol: displays the outline of symbols defined in current document.
• Inlay hint: shows inline hints for parameter names and deduced types.
• Code formatting.
• Diagnostics: displays current compilation errors.

Note: the code formatting feature requires clang-format to be available on your system. The location of clang-format can be configured in the extension settings.

Browser support

This extension provides support for browser version of vscode such as vscode.dev and github.dev. However, not all editor features are available.

Playground Features

This extension also provides features for using shaders:

• A command to build Slang files to different languages
  • SPIR-V
  • HLSL
  • GLSL
  • Metal
  • WGSL
• A command to run Slang Playground projects
• A command to get reflection information for a Slang project
• Documentation via the Show Playground Documentation command.

Configurations

Predefined preprocessor macros

You can specifiy the set of predefined preprocessor macros that the language server will use via the slang.predefinedMacros setting. This will help the language server to provide more accurate result.

Additional Search Path

By default, the extension will search for all sub directories in the current workspace for an included or imported file. You can specify additional search paths via the slang.additionalSearchPaths setting, which will be looked at first. You can also disable the search in workspace directories and make the extension to search only in configured search paths (via slang.searchInAllWorkspaceDirectories). The path of the currently opend file will always be used. This setting supports VS Code variables such as ${workspaceFolder}.

Commit characters for auto completion

Select whether or not to use commit characters to select an auto completion item in addition to pressing the enter key. You can enable commit characters for member completion only or for all types of completion suggestions.

clang-format location and style

The Slang language extension supports auto-formatting with clang-format. To use this feature, clang-format must be available on your system. By default, the extension will look for clang-format in PATH. If not found, the extension will try to use the clang-format bundled with VSCode C++ extension. If neither options are available, the user must provide the path to clang-format via the slang.format.clangFormatLocation extension setting.

You can customize the style to use with clang-format with the slang.format.clangFormatStyle setting.

You may also configure the slang.format.clangFormatFallbackStyle setting to specify the style to use when slang.format.clangFormatStyle is set to file but a .clang-format file is not found.

Demo

Auto completion and signature help:

Goto definition:

For more information

• Slang public repository
• Slang Visual Studio Code Extension repository