These are all gripes you might have with Vulkan Video. Unlike with Vulkan Video, in Compute, bounds checking is the norm. Overreading a regular buffer will not result in a GPU hang or crash. If you use pointers, it will, but if you use pointers, its up to you to check if overreads can happen.

The bitstream reader in FFmpeg for Vulkan Compute codecs is copied from the C code, along with bounds checking. The code which validates whether a block is corrupt or decodable is also taken from the C version. To date, I've never got a GPU hang while using the Compute codecs.

I wrote the Vulkan ProRes backend. The bitstream decoder was implemented from scratch, for a number of reasons.

First, the original code was reverse-engineered, before Apple published an SMPTE document describing the bitstream syntax. Second, I tried my best at optimizing the code for GPU hardware. And finally, I wanted take the learning opportunity :)

And to answer the parent's question, the shaders are written in pure GLSL. For instance, this is the ProRes bitstream decoder in question: https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/src/branch/master/liba...