Systems, computer readable media, and methods for a unified programming interface and language are disclosed. In one embodiment, the unified programming interface and language assists program developers write multi-threaded programs that can perform both graphics and data-parallel compute processing on GPUs. The same GPU programming language model can be used to describe both graphics shaders and compute kernels, and the same data structures and resources may be used for both graphics and compute operations. Developers can use multithreading efficiently to create and submit command buffers in parallel.