Last Few Weeks on DirectX Shader Compiler (2017-10-11)
What's been happening lately?
- Shader debug instrumentation is now available. The DxilDebugInstrumentation.cpp file describes it very well and it's a short read - go for it!
- More and more of HLSL is coming online for SPIR-V.
- Lots of fixes. Please keep those bug reports coming!
The Windows 10 SDK for Fall Creators Update (10.0.16299.15) is now available! This includes a version that's roughly what we have in the dxil-2017-06 branch. We'll update the build process soon to support it properly, and we'll start phasing out support for older SDKs.
In particular, phasing out support for older SDKs also means phasing out support for older dxil.dll validator versions. Sometimes we need to constrain our output or reproduce issues if we detect and old validator being used, but given that this is a build-time component, developers can upgrade compiler and validator simultaneously and we needn't keep an ever-growing list of prior validator versions.
Also, in case you missed it, there is an interactive wave sample available. Nice visualization of how this works.
Actually running the shader debug instrumentation requires invoking the optimizer directly; this is based on the same API we use to work with passes. I'll discuss more about how the pipeline works and how parts can be programmed in a future post.
Enjoy!