Resolved Burst GPU

There was a hackweek once or twice (last one probably 2019) where we translated burst-like c# into shader code and compiled that as a shader. Nobody was that high on the idea of really shipping it because, among other reasons, there's a lot of tooling and communal knowledge around hlsl that wouldn't transfer that cleanly, and it doesn't provide anywhere near the same benefits over hlsl that c# over c++ on the cpu does (namely safety & ease of portability compared to c++).

Shader compilation depends on the graphics API. In dx12, a compiler called dxc compiles hlsl to directx bytecode, which is handed to the gpu driver, which translates it into actual internal gpu instructions.

In vulkan, unity translates hlsl into spir-v or whatever the vulkan shading language is called, and then I believe it's a similar path to dx12. I bet metal is similar too, but I haven't seen it myself.

In opengl, unity translates hlsl to glsl, and then the full text of the glsl is handed to the driver, which compiles it the first time it's used. This is why in opengl games you used to have hitches whenever you saw something for the first time, until devs noticed and started doing stuff in loading to trick the driver into thinking it was using the shader during the loading screen, so that the hitch would happen during the loading screen rather than during actual play.

Consoles tend to behave like dx12/vulkan/metal these days.