Generating MSL shaders programmatically about modularshaderlanguage HOT 3 CLOSED

MSL doesn't have an AST of its own as it is a meta-language built on top of GLSL. Parsing has two main phases:

1. The code is passed through a C++ pre-processor (boost::wave) and converted into tokens.
2. Fragments of GLSL are extracted from the tokens to be processed for the individual shaders. This primarily consists of filtering (based on the [[stage]] tags) and handling a few specialized cases by hand.

A translation from Julia would technically be possible if you were to output the extended GLSL syntax that MSL parses, either saving to a temporary file or providing a stream (e.g. std::stringstream) and passing it to the compile() function for the target you want to use.

Is your goal for compute or graphics? MSL supports compute shaders, but within the context of a graphics pipeline for use in graphics APIs such as Vulkan, OpenGL, and Metal. This distinction is important, since compute shaders run in a graphics pipeline don't support the full feature set of pure GPGPU compute such as CUDA and OpenCL.

If your goal is compute rather than graphics, a better fit may be SPIRV-LLVM-Translator. If you can translate Julia to LLVM IR, SPIRV-LLVM-Translator should allow you to convert it to SPIR-V that can be run in OpenCL.

from modularshaderlanguage.

My goal is to produce shaders for graphics. GPU computing is actually fairly well supported in Julia. Perhaps it is better to use something like https://github.com/graphitemaster/glsl-parser and extend it with Julia.

from modularshaderlanguage.

In that case, you will probably be better off with glslang, which is the official GLSL parser. It would offer the most complete language support, and already supports parsing a different language (HLSL) into the same AST.

from modularshaderlanguage.