Ecma TC57 - HLSL

TC57 Meeting Minutes: 2026/03/17

Minutes of the:1st meeting of Ecma TC57
held in:Zoom (virtual)
on:17 March 2026
Chairs:Chris Bieneman, Chair (Microsoft), Farzon Lotfi, Vice-chair (Microsoft)
Attendees:Chris Bieneman (Microsoft), Farzon Lotfi (Microsoft), Nathan Gauër (Google), Karen Dintino (AMD), Mark Herdeg (AMD), Michael Bedy (AMD), Daniel Brown (AMD), Alex Sepkowski (Microsoft), Deric Cheung (Microsoft), Ashley Coleman (Microsoft), Timothy Corringham (AMD), Joshua Batista (Microsoft), Alexander Johnston (AMD), Justin Bogner (Microsoft), Tex Riddell (Microsoft), Finn Plumber (Microsoft), Kaitlin Peng (Microsoft), Helena Kotas (Microsoft), Damyan Pepper (Microsoft), Sarah Spall (Microsoft), Jesse Barker (Invited Expert), Aki Rose Braun (Ecma International), Samina Husain (Ecma International)
Secretary:Samina Husain (Ecma International), Aki Braun (Ecma International)

1 Welcome, opening and meeting logistics

Samina Husain briefly welcomed all delegates and invited experts to the first meeting of TC57: High Level Shader Language. From there, chair Chris Bieneman began the teleconference and invited all attendees to express their opinions on process to make sure the committee functioned for all participants. All attendees were informed that the meeting was recorded and transcribed for the purpose of note-taking, and directed to review the video recording and legal disclaimer if they were not familiar.

2 Approval of the minutes of previous meetings

This was the first meeting, so there were no previous minutes to approve.

3 Review of the agenda

The agenda was created from a pull request on the TC57 GitHub organisation

  • Approve Meeting Agenda
  • TC bootstrap schedule (@llvm-beanz)
    • How often and what day/time should we meet?
    • What meeting platform should we use (Ecma Zoom/MSFT Teams/Google Meet/???)
  • TC Process proposal (@llvm-beanz)
    • An issue has been filed to collect feedback asynchronously.
  • Current specification status (@llvm-beanz)
    • The current draft from Microsoft is available for review (PDF, HTML).
      • How would the committee like to review and integrate this work?
      • Proposal: Review and integrate by clause/sections in small chunks. An example PR has been posted integrating basic tooling, an introduction and the first two clauses.
    • Microsoft has proposals in flight, which TC57 should evaluate. Active proposals Microsoft would like to contribute are listed in this issue .

4 Discussions

4.1 Meeting logistics

The chair and secretary discussed various constraints on future meeting days and times. Due to conflicts across various delegates’ calendars, only the next meeting is scheduled thus far, for 31 March. The committee will continue to work on scheduling in the meantime.

Agendas can be contributed to by opening a pull request against the Meetings directory in the HLSL GitHub Repo.

4.2 Contribution process

Initially, the committee will use a two-pronged workflow for making changes to the specification—a proposal flow for new content, and a defect flow for edits and corrections. There are issue templates in the HLSL repository for each, in addition to the documentation.

Delegates will seek to strike a balance between informatively documenting current behaviours—even when conflicting—and reaching consensus on normative behaviour.

The committee also plans to track vendor extensions.

4.3 Initial commit

There is an open pull request for build tasks, folder structure, and non-normative text such as intro and scope. The chair suggests a minimum two-week review period for open pull requests before merge, which will always end with a meeting. The committee will revisit this review period length in the future once early text is integrated.

4.4 Document structure & authoring

The chair has an early draft prepared using LaTeX. The committee will plan to produce a document that aligns with Ecma house style regardless of which format it uses. The secretary will investigate integrating identifiers to the Ecma house style.

There is currently an open pull request to describe two ongoing versions of HLSL are currently identified as “202x” and “202y”, with the former focusing on implementation reality with some specific intentional changes, whereas the latter will build on top of that with new features and proposals. The chair requests that the committee review the PR with the intent of merging during the next meeting.

4.5 Current proposals from Microsoft

There are approximately a dozen proposals in-flight for the two proposed versions (as described in 4.4) of HLSL. The chair seeks to transition these proposals into the Ecma process, with thorough review from the committee to ensure broad interest and adoption beyond just Microsoft. Similarly, the chair will in the future begin reassigning issues from Microsoft to T57 and welcomes participation and feedback from the committee in that process.

5 Any other business

There was no other business

6 Next meetings

The committee will meet on 31 March at 17:00 CEST (UTC+2), 10:00 CDT (UTC-7)

6.1 Past and Future Agendas

Agendas can be found on GitHub.

7 Conclusion

The chair wrapped up the meeting and the call concluded.


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