GLSL optimizer

A C++ library that takes GLSL shaders, does some GPU-independent optimizations on them and outputs GLSL or Metal source back. Optimizations are function inlining, dead code removal, copy propagation, constant folding, constant propagation, arithmetic optimizations and so on.

Apparently quite a few mobile platforms are pretty bad at optimizing shaders; and unfortunately they also lack offline shader compilers. So using a GLSL optimizer offline before can make the shader run much faster on a platform like that. See performance numbers in this blog post.

Even for drivers that have decent shader optimization, GLSL optimizer could be useful to just strip away dead code, make shaders smaller and do uniform/input reflection offline.

Almost all actual code is Mesa 3D's GLSL compiler; all this library does is spits out optimized GLSL or Metal back, and adds GLES type precision handling to the optimizer.

This GLSL optimizer is made for Unity's purposes and is built-in starting with Unity 3.0.

GLSL Optimizer is licensed according to the terms of the MIT license.

See change log here.

Usage

Visual Studio 2010 (Windows, x86/x64) and Xcode 5+ (Mac, i386) project files for a static library are provided in projects/vs2010/glsl_optimizer.sln and projects/xcode5/glsl_optimizer_lib respectively.

Note: only the VS and Xcode project files are maintained and should work at any time. There's also a cmake and gyp build system for Linux et al., and some stuff in contrib folder - all that may or might not work.

For Linux you can use cmake. Just type "cmake . && make" in the root directory. This will build the optimizer library and some executable binaries.

Interface for the library is src/glsl/glsl_optimizer.h. General usage is:

ctx = glslopt_initialize(targetVersion);
for (lots of shaders) {
	shader = glslopt_optimize (ctx, shaderType, shaderSource, options);
	if (glslopt_get_status (shader)) {
		newSource = glslopt_get_output (shader);
	} else {
		errorLog = glslopt_get_log (shader);
	}
	glslopt_shader_delete (shader);
}
glslopt_cleanup (ctx);

Tests

There's a testing suite for catching regressions, see tests folder. In VS, build and run glsl_optimizer_tests project; in Xcode use projects/xcode5/glsl_optimizer_tests project. The test executable requires path to the tests folder as an argument.

Each test comes as three text files; input, expected IR dump and expected optimized GLSL dump. GLES3 tests are also converted into Metal.

If you're making changes to the project and want pull requests accepted easier, I'd appreciate if there would be no test suite regressions. If you are implementing a feature, it would be cool to add tests to cover it as well!

Notes

• GLSL versions 1.10 and 1.20 are supported. 1.10 is the default, use #version 120 to specify 1.20. Higher GLSL versions might work, but aren't tested now.
• GLSL ES versions 1.00 and 3.00 are supported.

Status and Future

Note: As of mid-2016, the project is unlikely to have any significant developments. At Unity we are largely moving to a different shader compilation pipeline, with glsl-optimizer mostly not used. So from my side there won't be significant work done on it :(

Dev Notes

Pulling Mesa upstream:

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
sh removeDeletedByUs.sh
# inspect files, git rm unneeded ones, fix conflicts etc.
# git commit

Rebuilding flex/bison parsers:

• When .y/.l files are changed, the parsers are not rebuilt automatically,
• Run ./generateParsers.sh to do that. You'll need bison & flex (on Mac, do "Install Command Line Tools" from Xcode)
• I use bison 2.3 and flex 2.5.35 (in OS X 10.8/10.9)