I have no idea if this will lead to anything, but hey, it’s fun at least!

Interesting stuff anyway!

My issue with current way of writing shaders is that it’s very much tied into how things are operating. For example, if you have a simple textured surface with Lambertian BRDF – you still have to write shaders differently if you’re doing single pass per light forward renderer, or multiple lights per pass forward renderer, or hybrid renderer, etc. Even though there’s no good reason to do that; it should be enough just to state “albedo comes form texture” and “use Lambertian BRDF”.

So that’s what I’m playing around with. What I have so far does not do any fancy translation/generation/compilation, it just merely pastes all the boilerplate code around (i.e. it produces pretty much the same shader as it would be hand-written). In majority of cases, lots of things done in a shader are really standard (transform position, compute fog, set up blending modes, transform UVs, do tangent space transforms, pass down light vectors etc.).

I do agree that for most ‘normal’ render paths an abstraction like this could be useful though, although my inherent distrust of passing code through too many compilers / translators / generators would make me scrutinise the results very closely.