Khronos has published the 2026 Real-Time Shading Ecosystem Survey Report, based on responses from over 400 shader developers, graphics programmers, and rendering engineers. Key findings: shader debugging and profiling is the top pain point by a wide margin (53% ranked it a top-3 issue, average pain score 52/100). GLSL leads shading language usage at 60%, followed by HLSL (41%), SPIR-V (39%), and Slang at 34%. Cross-platform shader porting affects 64% of developers. Linux usage is surprisingly high at 74%, indicating a significant non-games developer base. There is strong community interest (73%) in participating in Khronos working groups, and high demand for a cross-vendor shader debugging standard. The community also expressed interest in Khronos stewarding projects like VCC/Shady and Rust-GPU.
