Mesa's NIR Linker Taking On More Duties - Further Enhancing Linker Speed

The NIR intermediate representation is already faster than GLSL IR and TGSI but could be seeing even quicker linking speeds moving forward.

Beyond other recent NIR achievements like RadeonSI now exclusively relying on NIR, a now-merged set of patches by Valve open-source developer Timothy Arceri works on nursing NIR into more roles.

The new code in Mesa 20.0-devel further moves the NIR linker closer to handling uniforms and varyings, which will allow more GLSL IR optimization passes moving forward and as part of that faster linking of compiled shaders.

These NIR improvements are still ongoing but great to see all of the work continued and embracing around this modern graphics intermediate representation by Mesa drivers. Mesa 20.0 as the next stable step forward should be out around the end of February.