mapbox-glsl-optimizer

GLSL optimizer
==============

A C++ library that takes GLSL shaders, does some GPU-independent optimizations on them
and outputs GLSL back. Optimizations are function inlining, dead code removal, copy propagation,
constant folding, constant propagation, arithmetic optimizations and so on.

Apparently quite a few mobile platforms are pretty bad at optimizing GLSL shaders; and
unfortunately they also lack offline shader compilers. So using a GLSL optimizer offline
before can make the shader run much faster on a platform like that. See performance numbers
in this blog post.

Almost all actual code is Mesa 3D's GLSL
compiler; all this library does is spits out optimized GLSL back, and adds GLES type precision
handling to the optimizer.

This GLSL optimizer is made for Unity's purposes and is built-in
starting with Unity 3.0.

GLSL Optimizer is licensed according to the terms of the MIT license.

See badly maintained change log.

Usage
-----

Visual Studio 2010 (Windows, x86/x64) and Xcode 5+ (Mac, i386) project files for a static
library are provided in projects/vs2010/glsl_optimizer.sln and projects/xcode5/glsl_optimizer_lib
respectively.

> Note: only the VS and Xcode project files are maintained and should work at any time.
> There's also a cmake and gyp build system for Linux et al., and some stuff in contrib folder -
> all that may or might not work.

For Linux you can use cmake. Just type "cmake . && make" in the root directory.
This will build the optimizer library and some executable binaries.

Interface for the library is src/glsl/glsl_optimizer.h. General usage is:

ctx = glslopt_initialize();
for (lots of shaders) {
shader = glslopt_optimize (ctx, shaderType, shaderSource, options);
if (glslopt_get_status (shader)) {
newSource = glslopt_get_output (shader);
} else {
errorLog = glslopt_get_log (shader);
}
glslopt_shader_delete (shader);
}
glslopt_cleanup (ctx);

Tests
-----

There's a testing suite for catching regressions, see tests folder. In VS, build
and run glsl_optimizer_tests project; in Xcode use projects/xcode5/glsl_optimizer_tests
project. The test executable requires path to the tests folder as an argument.

Each test comes as three text files; input, expected IR dump and expected optimized
GLSL dump.

If you're making changes to the project and want pull requests accepted easier, I'd
appreciate if there would be no test suite regressions. If you are implementing a
feature, it would be cool to add tests to cover it as well!

Notes
-----

* GLSL versions 1.10 and 1.20 are supported. 1.10 is the default, use #version 120 to specify
1.20.
* GLSL ES versions 1.00 and 3.00 are supported.

Dev Notes
---------

Pulling Mesa upstream:

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
sh removeDeletedByUs.sh
# inspect files, git rm unneeded ones, fix conflicts etc.
# git commit

Rebuilding flex/bison parsers:

When .y/.l files are changed, the parsers are not* rebuilt automatically,
* Run ./generateParsers.sh to do that. You'll need bison & flex (on Mac, do "Install Command Line Tools" from Xcode)
* I use bison 2.3 and flex 2.5.35 (in OS X 10.8/10.9)