Shader resources may be specified for input to a shader using a hierarchical data structure which may be referred to as a descriptor set. The descriptor set may be bound to a bind point of the shader and may contain slots with pointers to memory containing shader resources. The shader may reference a particular slot of the descriptor set using an offset, and may change shader resources by referencing a different slot of the descriptor set or by binding or rebinding a new descriptor set. A graphics pipeline may be specified by creating a pipeline object which specifies a shader and a rendering context object, and linking the pipeline object. Part or all of the pipeline may be validated, cross-validated, or optimized during linking.