The latest happenings in renderling-land

Wed 11 Feb, 2026🔗

2026 NLnet Funding is Official🔗

The Memorandum of Understanding for the Renderling Ecosystem project has been signed with NLnet under the NGI0 Commons Fund. This makes the second year of NLnet funding official, and I'm excited to get started on the work ahead.

A New Direction: Embracing WGSL🔗

The biggest change in this round of work is that Renderling will be moving away from Rust-GPU and toward tighter integration with WebGPU and WGSL.

To support this, I've started work on wgsl-rs, a procedural macro crate that lets you write WGSL shaders in a subset of Rust. Code written with wgsl-rs runs on the CPU in Rust and on the GPU via generated WGSL — same types, same logic, fully testable. It works on stable Rust, produces human-readable WGSL output, needs no custom toolchains and even generates wgpu linkage for you!

The funded milestones will take wgsl-rs to a beta release on crates.io, then adapt crabslab and craballoc to work with it, and finally rewrite Renderling's internals on the new stack.

GPU ECS: podecs🔗

Part of the funded work is a new crate called podecs — a GPU-accelerated Entity Component System where components are plain old data defined with wgsl-rs, stored in GPU-accessible slabs, and systems run as compute shaders. This is the piece that makes massively parallel scene management possible and lays the groundwork for what comes next.

The Road to Global Illumination🔗

The second half of the project focuses on rendering. The plan is to build a GPU ray tracer first, validate it against a reference image suite, and then adapt it for real-time performance using techniques like wavefront path tracing and raymarching. The end goal is real-time global illumination integrated with Renderling's existing lighting system.

Rend3 Compatibility🔗

Rend3 has been an important renderer in the Rust ecosystem, and there are projects out there that depend on it. Part of this funded work includes designing and implementing an API compatibility layer for Rend3 users, along with a migration guide and example programs. If you have an existing Rend3 project, Renderling aims to be a viable path forward.

What's Next🔗

I'll be working through these milestones over the course of the year and posting updates here as things progress. If you're interested in contributing or just following along, check out the repos:

Sun 30 Nov, 2025🔗

The past two months I've been pretty slammed with my new job and family stuff, but I've still been working on this project, albeit a bit sporadically.

crabslab changes🔗

I've managed to get a large PR finished on crabslab that provides synchronization of values changed by shaders on the GPU back to their CPU caches.

This change has been a long time coming, and it unlocks a lot of potential for interesting changes in Renderling, and beyond.

Specifically these changes help in any situation where a shader computes some data that then gets used on the CPU. And it does that with a minimal number of writes to and from the GPU.

This is all part of a grand scheme to blur the lines between GPU and CPU, and make GPU programming easier, which is essentially the main goal behind next year's worth of Renderling work.

2026 NLNet project🔗

Renderling was selected for another year of funding by NLnet. I'm currently working on the project plan and we have double the funding of last year, which means I'll be able to take on paid contributors and get more accomplished in the same amount of time.

Next year's work is focusing on the ecosystem and then riding that rising tide towards global illumination.

Global illumination is a very lofty goal, especially for a renderer that targets the web, but I think we can get there with some key tradeoffs.

Wed 24 September, 2025🔗

I've pushed the lighting chapter of the manual live.

Part of this was fixing a bug in image based lighting regarding bindgroup invalidation.

Sun 21 September, 2025🔗

I've done a rework of the API, greatly improved the documentation and created a user's manual full of examples. See the PR for the API change and initial manual w/ examples here.

I've also made somewhat drastic website changes:

The devlog is no more🔗

I'm moving away from the super long devlog format to something that hopefully is a bit more focused.

Now the devlog is broken up into two "things":

  1. Small news blurbs on this "news" page.

  2. Long-form stream of consciousness "devlog" articles for specific features that might span multiple days, weeks, or months.

why

The devlog was getting huge, and it's a bit too chaotic. Now I'll be live-blogging feature development in specific articles, like I did for Light Tiling, Live. I'm hoping this does a better job of keeping the devlogs on-topic instead of being a big jumble of different things.

All other blurbs are news, so they can live on the news page. I'm just trying to stay organized as this project grows.

But - the old devlog will stay where it was, at devlog, for posterity and so the links still work.

User's manual🔗

Check out the manual here.

The manual covers the basics, but lacks lighting examples.

Obviously it's a work in progress.

I'll be making sure that it's complete after getting it online. Even in its incomplete state, it has lots of workable, tested examples in it, and I hope it helps folks get up and running with the library.

Documentation updates🔗

There's a ton more documentation coverage. I did a big audit of the current documentation and added more where needed as well as revamped the existing docs.

The latest docs are now hosted here at /docs, due to the fact that Renderling depends on a not yet released version of spirv-std, which the Rust-GPU group is still working on releasing.

API changes🔗

I've removed the crabslab::Id and craballoc::Hybrid* types from the public API.

I figured that it shouldn't be necessary for users to understand anything about slabs and descriptors.

Builder patterns

Now all the various resources (Primitive, Material, Vertices etc) adhere to a builder pattern for configuration and updates.

Skybox is now separate from Ibl.

Up until this point, if you wanted to render a skybox, that skybox would also perform image based lighting automatically. I decided to decouple these now, as there are valid situations where you may not want IBL, but do want a skybox.