Whoa. D3D is switching to SPIR-V as shader bytecode format! This is excellent, and I guess lets them move away from their llvm 3.7 fork easier. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-adopting-spir-v/
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future - DirectX Developer Blog

Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released, DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V™. The HLSL team is committed to open development processes and collaborating with The Khronos® Group and LLVM Project. We’re sharing this […]

DirectX Developer Blog
@aras next they'll switch to Vulkan with DXVK/VKD3D for legacy support and eventually Windows will be a Linux distro with a proprietary desktop, ads and crappy "genuine advantage" licensing. Probably they'll buy Ubuntu for that, it already integrates ads, a commercial pro mode and is reasonably popular...
@Doomed_Daniel @aras IMHO the logical next step should be to ditch HLSL in favour of a handful of C and C++ extensions in Clang (similar to what Apple did with MSL).