In early March we reported that Microsoft wanted to add DirectX + HLSL support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler. And starting this week, early code for Microsoft's graphics work began landing in LLVM 15.0.
Microsoft's open-source DirectX shader compiler "DXC", based on the old LLVM/Clang 3.7 fork, is now working on a modern DirectX shader compiler that will be upstream of LLVM and then also enjoy the updated C++ Features, LLVM tool improvements, and more.
New commits have been added to the LLVM project to add clang DirectX target support , HLSL language options and preprocessors , and stubs for the DirectX backend . The code that has been merged into LLVM so far contains only the groundwork, an effort to lay the groundwork for adding DirectX/HLSL options and boilerplate code.
Microsoft's current focus is on DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) and SPIR-V support, and DirectX Bytecode (DXBC) support may be added later for bytecode used on DirectX 9 through DirectX 11.
Further reading