vulkano

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I'd like to add safe live shader reloading to vulkano. To support this, we would need to add some way to tell if the new shader can be substituted for the old shader. In particular, the shaders inputs, outputs, and other particulars should not have changed.

To add this functionality, I propose a refactor of vulkano-shaders: instead of directly generating the rust shader module code from the parsed SPIR-V instructions, we would instead create an intermediate Shader object, which contains all information needed to codegen the rust shader module code.

To live reload a shader, we would then create a Shader object representing the old shader, and one representing the new shader, and check them for compatibility. If they are compatible, the new shader bytecode can be substituted for the old shader bytecode without needing to recompile the program.

In addition to supporting shader reloading, this would have the additional benefit of making vulkano-shaders testable, since now tests can be written that assert properties of the Shader object.

I've started working on this and I'm hoping to get feedback on the approach. I've mostly finished entry points and specialization constants, descriptor sets and structs are still to go. It needs a lot of work, and I'm happy to make any changes to it, large or small.

You can find the branch here: https://github.com/casey/vulkano/tree/refactor-vulkano-shaders

In particular, the Shader object is here: https://github.com/casey/vulkano/blob/refactor-vulkano-shaders/vulkano-shaders/src/shader.rs

And I've started to split codegen into its own module: https://github.com/casey/vulkano/tree/refactor-vulkano-shaders/vulkano-shaders/src/codegen

As part of the refactor, codegen could be made a separate module from vulkano-shaders.

I just pushed some diffs that refactored descriptor sets. The major piece of functionality that still needs to be refactored is struct handling. And of course it still needs lots of cleanup and tons of tests.

As a second step, it would be nice to refactor codegen to use a proper templating library, so that the template text is easier to read and modify.

I don't think we need a templating library that does text. Instead we could use the quote crate for example, and turn the Rust code into a string after generation.

That's an excellent idea!

I'm on OS X, and I found a bug in MoltenVK that reduced my confidence in using it, so I've stopped working on this for now :/

Maybe this can be resumed after #910 is done?

Just cc'ing myself as we're also currently interested in a solution for this for nannou-org/nannou#223.

@casey I'm curious if your MoltenVK bug has since been solved? We've been testing it with for nannou-org/nannou#240 and it seems to be relatively reliable.

@mitchmindtree Unfortunately I haven't tested it in a while, so I'm not sure if it's still broken.

+1

Having to rebuild/recompile and restart the whole application just to tweak a shader is a massive productivity sink.

I'd be also happy to have this in "development mode" only and can tolerate the shader reloading fail (but not panic) with the application handling the error.

Any update on this?

Unfortunately I stopped using Vulkan, so I'm unlikely to make further progress on this. I think it's a good approach, but my code is probably super out of date at this point, and was incomplete to begin with. If anyone feels like resurrecting and completing the branch, please feel free!