Add January development update blog post (#44)

* Add blog post for january dev update

* Fix formatting

* Add image for january devblog update

* Update 2025-01-10-january-dev-update.md

Author: swoods-nv

_posts/2025-01-10-january-dev-update.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Slang Development Update - January 2025"
+date: 2025-01-10 19:00:00 +0000
+categories: [ "blog" ]
+tags: [slang]
+author: "Yong He, NVIDIA, and Shannon Woods, NVIDIA, Slang Working Group Chair"
+image: /images/posts/2025-01-10-dev-updates.webp
+human_date: "January 10, 2025"
+---
+
+Happy new year, Slang enthusiasts! As we beckon in 2025, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the many improvements we’ve been able to land in response to the incredible and enthusiastic engagement and feedback from the Slang community! Take a look at what’s new:
+
+**Improvement on specialization constants and push constants**
+- Specialization constants are now supported for WGSL and Metal targets.
+- Fixed reflection API issues around specialization constants and push constants.
+- Added more validation checks on invalid use of specialization/push constant attributes.
+
+**Improvement on SPIRV pointer support**
+- Added loadAligned and storeAligned intrinsics for aligned load/stores.
+- Now supports pointers to a struct with trailing unsized arrays.
+- Dynamic dispatch via interface-typed pointers are now supported.
+- Reflection on pointer element type now correctly reports the scalar layout.
+
+**SPIRV/GLSL improvements**
+- Added SV_DrawIndex semantic that maps to the DrawIndex builtin
+- Added Sampler2DShadow and friends to combined texture comparison-sampler types.
+- Explicit GLSL binding locations (as in [vk::binding()] and in layout(binding=...) qualifiers) can now use compile time expressions. (contribution from community)
+- -fvk-invert-y option now works for mesh shader position outputs.
+- Added nonuniformEXT intrinsics when consuming GLSL code.
+
+**Reflection API and binding improvement**
+- Explicit [vk::location(N)] binding is now supported for WGSL and Metal targets.
+- IMetadata::isParameterLocationUsed now supports reporting usage info on stage varying inputs/outputs.
+- Now support querying both user defined and system builtin attributes on types and functions with the new findAttributeByName API.
+- Attribute::getArgumentValueByFloat now correctly returns the value even if the argument in the source code is in the form of a integer literal.
+- WGSL backend now respects explicit binding qualifiers.
+
+These improvements are available in Slang v2025.2.
+
+Thank you to everyone in the Slang community for your feedback and your contributions! We’d also like to recognize GitHub users [@juliusikkala](https://github.com/juliusikkala) and [@fairywreath](https://github.com/fairywreath) for landing a number of fixes and improvements.
+
+We’re also happy to share that the video and slides from last month’s Slang Birds of a Feather session are now available! This was a great session, with a full room of developers who brought insightful questions – give it a watch!