Making it easier to work with shaders https://git.yummers.dev/slang.git/atom?h=master 2025-05-30T17:00:38+00:00 2025-05-30T17:00:38+00:00 Theresa Foley 10618364+tangent-vector@users.noreply.github.com 2025-05-30T17:00:38+00:00 urn:sha1:ec7ab914f79978b8980c7797e20d3399604b1f86 The files `slang-fossil.{h,cpp}` define a new serialization format that is designed to support data being memory-mapped in and then traversed as-is. The `docs/design/serialization.md` document was updated with details on this new format. The `slang-serialize-fossil.{h,cpp}` files define implementations of the recently introduced `ISerializerImpl` interface for reading/writing this new binary format. The overall structure of these implementations is heavily based on the existing RIFF implementation from `slang-serialize-riff.{h,cpp}`. Switching the AST serialization over to use this format required almost no changes to `slang-serialize-ast.cpp`. The new format is more space-efficient than the RIFF-based format in memory (by factor of over 2x), but is actually *worse* than the RIFF-based format in terms of how it affects the size of `slang.dll`, because the new format is seemingly less amenable to LZ4 compression. A few pieces of utility code were added or moved as part of this work: * The `core/slang-internally-linked-list.*` implementation is just a type that was used as part of `core/slang-riff.*`, but that wasn't really RIFF-specific. * The `core/slang-blob-builder.*` files implement a low-level utility for building a binary format in memory out of "chunks". The overall structure of this type is based on the RIFF-specific builder implementation, but has been generalized so that it should apply to other kinds of binary serialization. * The `core/slang-relative-ptr.h` file implements a simple relative pointer type, which is currently only used by the `slang-fossil.h` format. If there are concerns about adopting the new format immediately for the AST, this change could be modified to introduce all the new code, but leave the AST serialization using the previous RIFF-based format.