- Qt 6.8
- Shader Tools
- Qt Shader Tools
- Qt 6.8.0 Reference Documentation

# Qt Shader Tools

The Qt Shader Tools module builds on the SPIR-V Open Source Ecosystem as described at the Khronos SPIR-V web site.

The main components of the Qt shader conditioning system are:

- the `qsb` command-line tool
- CMake integration for the `qsb` tool
- QShader (part of the QtGui module)
- QShaderBaker (part of this module, the library equivalent of the `qsb` tool)

## Articles and Guides

- Qt Shader Tools Overview
- QSB Manual
- Qt Shader Tools Build System Integration (CMake)

### C++ API

QShaderBaker | Compiles a GLSL/Vulkan shader into SPIR-V, translates into other shading languages, and gathers reflection metadata

Note: Applications and libraries should avoid using the C++ API directly, unless they have a good reason to do so. Rather, prefer relying on offline pre-processing by invoking the `qsb` command-line tool at build time via CMake, or manually if invoking via CMake is not feasible. The `qsb` tool uses QShaderBaker and writes the serialized version of the generated QShader into a file. The usage of the C++ API should be restricted to cases where run time processing and translation cannot be avoided, and the performance implications are understood. An example of this are applications that work with user-provided or dynamically generated shader source strings.

## Licenses and Attributions

Qt Shader Tools runtime library is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company. In addition, it is available under free software licenses. Since Qt 6.3, these free software licenses are GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3, or the GNU General Public License, version 2.

The `qsb` command-line tool is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company. In addition, it is available under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

See Qt Licensing for further details.

Furthermore, Qt Shader Tools in 6.8.0 may contain third party modules under following permissive licenses:

SPIRV-Cross, version sdk-1.3.261.0 | Apache License 2.0 and Khronos License
glslang, version 13.0.0 | BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License, and Khronos License, and Apache License 2.0, and GNU General Public License v3.0 or later with Bison exception 2.2, and AML glslang variant License