Questions on shaders

I’m just starting to evaluate the Piston game engine, having gone through the tutorials and played with the sprite example. So far things looks good. I’m wondering if and how one can combine working with 2d graphics as in the sprite example, with shaders. For example I would like to use a shader to create a background starfield, and then have a 2d space ship that moves across it. I assume there is no trouble in doing those two things at once? Like I could use the cube example and sprite example, and merge them together to do that?

Question part2: The examples I see that use shaders are using glsl, but suppose I wanted to use gfx-rs as a backend so that it could run on non opengl platforms, can I still use shaders, and how?