SHADERS ARE ANNOYING

...and probably always will be. While we've come quite a way from the horror of HLSL/GLSL/ARB v1 atrocities, ultimately shaders are a gigantic band-aid slapped atop a festering architectural wound that cannot be healed. Then you have the hilarious situation of having to write code in what is effectively a C-variant, with its own commands, types, and quirks, regardless of whatever languages you're using for your base project. Then you have to shuttle data to and from the shaders, and get them to compile, and good luck debugging them (it's not impossible, but...).

It has been, and probably always will be, a gigantic headache, and I'm certainly going to die before a platform is released that is fast enough to get things done in real-time without shaders of some sort. I've accepted that. There are times when I enjoy being wrong; hopefully this ends up being one of them.

I haven't ranted properly in well over a decade. Humor me, would you?