shaders

It may be close to a technical impossibility, but the Circle compiler by Sean Baxter is attempting it. That's based on an aggressive "de-pointerization" (see [1] in particular for details). There's also academic work[2] to compile C++ to shaders. I agree that it's an open question how well that will work out. Also as pointed out elsethread, now that buffer device address is starting to land, the friction to compile pointer-intense C++ code should decrease even more. These are exciting times! [1]: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#approaching-circle-sha... [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14682

My favorite use is putting user-defined attributes on data members, and using reflection to generate a UI to manipulate those values. I do it with these shadertoys: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#reflection-and-attribu... Just mark your declarations up with custom attributes: [[.imgui::range_float { .1, 5 }]] float Zoom = 1.5; [[.imgui::range_float { 0, 1 }]] float Speed = .15; [[.imgui::range_float { .1, 1 }]] float XScale = .3; [[.imgui::range_float { 0, .5 }]] float YScale = .2; Then loop over the members with a meta for, and emit widget code that's guided by the attribute kind and data. These attributes each define a scrollbar. The kind of data you reflect over will likely come from within the program.

I think shader specialisation is handled pretty well in circle. Since you can essentially run arbitrary C++ code at compile time, selection and specialisation of a shader can even depend on hardware specific benchmarks. There is an extensive repo with examples here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders. One example decodes a sprite sheet stored as a png at compile time and creates a specialised compute shader for it. You can also easily implement a control UI based on reflection of uniform shader parameters. Anyways I understand that under different constraints (adherence to C++ standard, can't easily implement a whole C++ frontend and interpreter) this becomes much harder.