Last Week on DirectX Shader Compiler (2017-04-11)

Starting this to keep track of interesting developments in the shader compiler.

The biggest news was the release of Windows 10 Creators Update. The SDK includes dxil.dll, which is required to build DXIL shaders that can run without experimental mode being set, as well as a version of dxc and dxcompiler. The dxc and dxcompiler versions from GitHub are more recent and have many improvements we've made since.

Here are some highlights from the repo.

• Constant folding for DXIL intrinsics.
• Using mad for matrix mul. Helps with numerical stability as well.
• dxopt can now read from stdin. Handy when combining dxc to generate high-level IR, then try various pipeline configurations with dxopt from within a script.
• Simplified developer setup. You now have an alternative to installing the full WDK.

Other fixes and improvements as well, including many by antiagainst to help the code build in other environments.

Enjoy!