Are there major differences between shader languages?

Question

I am currently learning GLSL. It would seem that once you learn one of the shader languages, learning one of the others would not be too difficult. Is it something analogous to learning a widget toolset like wxWidgets and then switching to Qt? Once you get the idea of what is happening within one widget toolset, another toolset will do something similar since they are ultimately doing almost the same thing at some point? What are your experiences with going from one shader language to another?

Answer 1

Cg and HLSL are almost the same (same builtin function names). GLSL looks and feels a bit different (i.e. mix instead of lerp, use of a main-like function), but the overall transition is still easy. The only differences are in the details and in the respective APIs (i.e. stuff like matrix storage order).

Switching between shading languages is way easier than switching between GUI toolkits…