A high level shader construction syntax – Part III
This article is part of the a series of posts, the first ones can be found here:
Compile-time conditions
CONTEXT_IF(context.some_semantic) {
…
}
When the CONTEXT_IF is parsed, the translator splats the code in the curly braces if (or not if) the semantic is currently present in the context.
For instance in the snippet above if specular_color has not been calculated (i.e. GetSpecularColor()) was None, then the semantic will be missing from the context. In that case the CONTEXT_IFNOT will be true and the code will be added to the final shader. Keep in mind that all those conditions are evaluated at shader translation time and at the moment the translator reaches the line with the context conditional. If the tested semantic appears after the test in code, it won’t influence it.
The implementation supports condition nesting as well as polymorphics in conditions. However conditions can currently appear only in the main body of the shader and not in expanded polymorphics.
Implementation
A sample implementation of a translator that implements the enhanced syntax can be found on GitHub:
http://github.com/stoyannk/ShaderTranslator.
The sample can easily be modified to become a stand-alone library.
The major components are the ShaderTranslationUniverse and the ShaderTranslator. The universe is a holder for all the atoms, combinators and polymorphics. It is highly likely that all shaders in a product share a library of those components but it might not always be the case.
The ShaderTranslator performs the translation itself given a universe and the initial source code. It outputs valid HLSL SM4 code.
The translation process itself is heavily based on regular expression and performs a lot of string operations. To speed things up and reduce memory fragmentation, the temporary strings used during the translation process use a linear scratch allocator. It takes a big chunk of memory and always returns new blocks from it without ever freeing it. At the end of the translation the whole memory region is freed all at once. This scratch allocator is accessed as a thread-local variable. I wouldn’t recommend however using the translator at runtime – it is best suited as a step in the build process of the final product.
I wasn’t too pedantic at fixing allocations during the translation process so some containers used still access the default allocator. It would be trivial to change those too.
The main program comes with two sample shaders used for testing.
Follow Stoyan on Twitter: @stoyannk
