This allows shaders to declare and use pointer-type variables. Pointers
may be loaded and stored, be the result of an `OpSelect`, be passed to
and returned from functions, and even be passed as inputs to the `OpPhi`
instruction. All types of pointers may be used as variable pointers.
Variable pointers to storage buffers and workgroup memory may even be
loaded from and stored to, as though they were ordinary variables. In
addition, this enables using an interior pointer to an array as though
it were an array pointer itself using the `OpPtrAccessChain`
instruction.
This is a rather large and involved change, mostly because this is
somewhat complicated with a lot of moving parts. It's a wonder
SPIRV-Cross's output is largely unchanged. Indeed, many of these changes
are to accomplish exactly that! Perhaps the largest source of changes
was the violation of the assumption that, when emitting types, the
pointer type didn't matter.
One of the test cases added by the change doesn't optimize very well;
the output of `spirv-opt` here is invalid SPIR-V. I need to file a bug
with SPIRV-Tools about this.
I wanted to test that variable pointers to images worked too, but I
couldn't figure out how to propagate the access qualifier properly--in
MSL, it's part of the type, so getting this right is important. I've
punted on that for now.
Just like OpAccessChain we need to make use of the meta information
available to use from access_chain_internal as we can extract a packed
vector or transposed vector from a composite, not just memory load.
A block name cannot alias with any name in its own scope,
and it cannot alias with any other "global" name.
To solve this, we need to complicate the name cache updates a little bit
where we have a "primary" namespace and "secondary" namespace.
This is required to avoid relying on complex sub-expression elimination
in compilers, and generates cleaner code.
The problem case is if a complex expression is used in an access chain,
like:
Composite comp = buffer[texture(...)];
vec4 a = comp.a + comp.b + comp.c;
Before, we did not have common subexpression tracking for
OpLoad/OpAccessChain, so we easily ended up with code like:
vec4 a = buffer[texture(...)].a + buffer[texture(...)].b + buffer[texture(...)].c;
A good compiler will optimize this, but we should not rely on it, and
forcing texture(...) to a temporary also looks better.
The solution is to add a vector "implied_expression_reads", which works
similarly to expression_dependencies. We also need an extra mechanism in
to_expression which lets us skip expression read checking and do it
later. E.g. for expr -> access chain -> load, we should only trigger
a read of expr when using the loaded expression.
Based on a patch by Stefan Dösinger.
Metal cannot do signedness conversion on vertex attributes, and for good
reason. Putting a `uint4` into an `int4`, or a `char4` into a `uint4`,
would lose those values that are outside the range of the target type.
But putting a `uchar4` into a `short4` or an `int4`, or a `ushort4` into
an `int4`, should work. In that case, force the signedness in the shader
to match the declared type of the host.
Unfortunately, I don't really know how to automatically test this. This
remapping is done based on input parameters normally supplied by
MoltenVK. I'm not sure how we'd set this up for the command-line
`spirv-cross` tool.
Avoids certain cases of variance between translation units by forcing
every dependent expression of a store to be temporary.
Should avoid the major failure cases where invariance matters.
