Mesa's GLSL Compiler Has Been Made To Stand Alone

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's GLSL Compiler Has Been Made To Stand Alone

Ian Romanick of Intel has restored work on having a standalone Mesa GLSL compiler separate from the rest of the Mesa implementation. The purpose of this standalone compiler is largely for testing purposes by OpenGL game/application developers in trying to verify/validate behavior and be independent of the specific Mesa drivers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ1ODQ

[F i L]

This is great. One of the biggest problems with GLSL in the proprietary AMD/Nvidia drivers (on all OSes) is that they each have their own implementations (including front-ends). While that doesn't really apply to the open-source graphics stack, advancement of this kind of modularized tech might eventually encourage those companies to share a open front-end implementation (removing the burden from GLSL devs from needing to be aware of the differences). Which is an area HLSL has GLSL beat.

[curaga]

I've been using it as such since 2011. See Aras' glslopt on github.

A command-line GLSL compiler that checks offline if my shaders are valid.

[Remdul]

This is great news. The old 3DLabs GLSLValidator library was getting way outdated, most people stopped using it a long time ago.

The NVdia GLSL compiler is much more lenient compared to ATI/AMD, which is more strict (although the former can be configured to be more strict with proper #version statement).

By removing unnecissary dependecies on the Mesa compiler it will make it easier to integrate this in development tools/pipelines. I would also expect to see future plugins for gedit and other text editors. I'm looking forward to using it.