Ecma TC57 - HLSL

TC57 Meeting Minutes: 2026/04/28

Minutes of the:4th meeting of Ecma TC57
held in:Zoom (virtual)
on:28 April 2026
Chair:Chris Bieneman (Microsoft)
Vice-chair:Farzon Lotfi (Microsoft)
Attendees:Chris Bieneman (Microsoft), Justin Bogner (Microsoft), Gregory Roth (Nvidia), Nathan Gauër (Google), Steven Perron (Google), Kaitlin Peng (Microsoft), Helena Kotas (Microsoft), Ashley Coleman (Microsoft), Damyan Pepper (Microsoft), Jesse Barker (Invited Expert)
Secretary:Aki Braun (Ecma International)

1 Welcome, opening and meeting logistics

Chris Bieneman, chair of TC57, began the teleconference and welcomed attendees. Attendees were reminded of the committee’s code of conduct, Ecma’s IPR policy, and TC57’s royalty-free patent policy extension. All attendees were informed that the meeting was recorded and transcribed by Zoom 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 the virtual meeting of 14 April 2026

This meeting was scheduled before minutes from the previous meeting were prepared. They will be reviewed and approved at the next meeting.

3 Review of the agenda

The meeting’s agenda pull request was proposed and approved at the start of the meeting.

3.1 Editorial

  • Tooling update:
  • Small website fixes - hlsl-tc57#20
  • GitHub team tc57-editors is created
  • Added a CODEOWNERS file - hlsl-tc57#22
    • Automatically request review from tc57-editors on spec changes
    • Automatically request review from tc57-chairs for meetings agenda/minutes changes.

3.2 New proposals

3.3 Discussions

  • Confirm editor volunteers
  • Conformance Clause - hlsl-tc57#11
    • Ongoing discussion in the PR around implementation extensions to namespaces and types.
  • Review and merge:
  • Call for Consensus:
  • Review for 2026-05-12:
  • Review for merge 2026-05-12:

4 Editors’ report

The website is merged and working with GitHub pages. It includes an updated HTML version of the draft, along with a PDF version.

A tc57-editors GitHub team has been created.

A CODEOWNERS file has been added to GitHub to trigger automatic reviews from editors on spec text and chairs on agenda/minutes PRs.

5 New proposals

5.1 Conforming literals (#15)

This PR was only initially reviewed the morning of the meeting by editor Greg Roth, who had a significant number of comments to contribute. Greg was of the opinion that the clause was too presumptuous about its alignment as well as a gap in error handling.

Chris sought to clarify whether those concerns were blocking the proposal in its entirety, or rather referring to improvements the proposal would need before being integrated into the main body of the draft.

Chris agreed that perhaps some of the language around warnings was too prescriptive—that it was attempting to standardize implementation details—though Greg was interested in including some error handling.

Ashley Coleman (Microsoft) pointed out that TC57 should be focussed on the language’s design, and leave it to implementations to sort out whether or not they conform to the specification.

Steven alerted the committee that Google’s test suite for this was not thorough and should not be relied on. Chris warned that Microsoft’s future testing was also flawed due to technical constraints.

Consensus was that warning-related language, and in particular that language describing a specific implementation behaviour, should either be removed entirely or moved to an informative annex. The committee agreed with the changes in principle, but needs work before its content is appropriate for the specification.

The proposal reached consensus to be Under Consideration.

5.2 Overload resolution (#19)

Chris presented the Overload resolution proposal. This algorithm would provide deterministic scoring on overloads, building on top of and beyond C++.

The committee reached consensus to record this proposal us Under Consideration.

6 Discussions

6.1 Confirm editor volunteers

Steven Perron (Google) and Gregory Roth (Nvida) both tentatively volunteered to take on the role of editor in the previous meeting. They have both investigated expectations both from the committee and from the Ecma members they represent and confirmed their interest.

The result is that the HLSL specification will edited by a team of Steven, Greg, and chair Chris Bieneman.

6.2 Conformance clause

The conformance clause pull request was approved by the present editors and the committee. It remains open due to an unspecified build issue but will be merged before the next meeting.

6.3 Lexical conventions (#16)

This pull request was intentionally scoped to be as uncontroversial as possible, naming expected lexical conventions, character sets, and preprocessing grammar. The PR was approved by editor Steven Perron and Justin Bogner (Microsoft).

6.4 Advance proposal 0001 to Refinement

Chris presented proposal 0001 “HLSL 202x and 202y” to be advanced to Refinement. Due to the fact that this is a meta-proposal, it is expected to remain in this state for some time before advancing to Accepted or Completed as it gets polished and, well, refined.

The committee reached consensus to advance 0001.

6.5 Pending content to be merged on 12 May

The chair requests that all delegates review the following pull requests before the next meeting, at which time they will be brought for consensus to merge.

6.5.1 Basic Concepts Clause (#23)

This PR addresses processes such as linkage and translations, in addition to providing definitions and a reference to C++’s “One-Definition Rule”.

6.5.2 Conversions Clause (#24)

This clause covers implicit and explicit built-in conversions supported by HLSL.

6.6 Introducing proposals to be discussed on 12 May

6.6.1 HLSL 202x removals (#25)

Language features to be removed from source material to improve quality of HLSL.

6.6.2 cbuffer contexts (#26)

Restricts cbuffer declaration contexts to reduce the outright chaos of including a namespace which can include anything.

6.6.3 Restricted Unbound Arrays (#27)

Another removal from source material to improve quality of HLSL.

7 Any other business

Delegates had questions about the structure and process of standardizing within Ecma. The secretary explained how participation worked for members and delegates.

8 Next meetings

Future meetings will take place as Zoom video calls fortnightly. The next scheduled is on 12 May.

8.1 Past and Future Agendas

Agendas are viewable in GitHub and remain available in perpetuity.

9 Conclusion

The Chair wrapped up the meeting and the call concluded.


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