It’s been almost two months that I’ve been working on my glsl crate. This crate exposes a GLSL450 compiler that enables you to parse GLSL-formatted sources into memory in the form of an AST. Currently, that AST is everything you get from the parsing process – you’re free to do whatever you want with it. In the next days, I’ll write a GLSL writer (so that I can check that I can parse GLSL to GLSL…). I’d love to see contributions from Vulkan people to write a SPIR-V backend, though!

Just for the record, the initial goal I had in mind was to parse a subset of GLSL for my spectra demoscene framework. I’ve been planning to write my own GLSL-based shading language (with modules, composability, etc. etc.) and hence I need to be able to parse GLSL sources. Because I wanted to share my effort, I decided to create a dedicated project and here we are with a GLSL crate.

Currently, you can successfully parse a GLSL450-formatted source (or part of it, I expose all the intermediary parsers as well as it’s required by my needs to create another shading language over GLSL). See for instance this shading snippet parsed to an AST.

However, because the project is still very young, there a lot of features that are missing:

If you’re curious, you can start using the crate with glsl = "0.2.1" in your Cargo.toml. You probably want to use the translation_unit parser, which is the most external parser (it parses an actual shader). If you’re looking for something similar to my need and want to parse subparts of GLSL, feel free to dig in the documentation, and especially the parsers module, that exports all the parsers available to parse GLSL’s parts.

Either way, you have to pass a bytes slice. If your source’s type is String or &str, you can use the str::as_bytes() function to feed the input of the parsers.

Not all parsers are exported, only the most important ones. You will not find an octal parser, for instance, while it’s defined and used in the crate internally.

Call to contribution

If you think it’s worth it, I’m looking for people who would like to:

Happy coding, and keep the vibe!


↑ Rust GLSL crate
AST, compiler, GLSL, OpenGL, Rust, shader, shading, SPIR-V
Sun Jul 30 00:00:00 2017 UTC