DirectX Support Promoted To Official Target Within LLVM

Over the past four years there has been a lot of work on a DirectX back-end within the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft has backed the initiative for being able to lower LLVM IR into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for execution by Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers. This back-end is now officially supported. The LLVM DirectX back-end until now has been considered an experimental target and not enabled by the default LLVM builds and similar. But now it's been agreed upon for promoting it to being an official target of the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft HLSL compiler engineer Farzon Lotfi commented with the patch taking it to become an official LLVM target: "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." It followed this LLVM Discourse discussion over the past month on promoting it to an official target. In there is also confirmation of Microsoft planning to further enhance the LLVM DirectX code moving forward: "Looking ahead, our focus will shift towards supporting graphics and ray tracing shader, the newest Shader Models, and further tightening the integration between Clang’s HLSL frontend capabilities and the backend Codgen. With the backend transitioning to an official target and clang-dxc enabled by default, we anticipate a wider influx of user feedback, which will drive further conformance and performance tuning Aswell as define future feature completeness." The clang-dxc and HLSL support are now enabled by default beginning with next year's LLVM 24 release.