[Mesa-dev] [GSoC] Improved application of GLSL complier optimizations

[Alexander Mezin]

Hello.

I plan to participate in GSoC this year as a student. And I've found a
project idea which I like very much on X.Org's ideas page. It's called
"Improved application of GLSL compiler optimizations".

For me, it looks mostly like an optimization problem in mathematical
meaning. Benchmark could be treated as a function that computes a
score taking a sequence of passes as input. If I'm not mistaken, there
are more than 30 passes, so even trying all permutations will take a
long time, even if we imagine we can measure shader "quality"
immediately. I think it's worth to try various heuristic optimization
techniques like simulated annealing or genetic algorithm.

Furthermore, looks like the same pass sequence could give different
results on different shaders, so it won't be possible to determine
single optimal sequence. But some limited randomization could help
dealing with it, probably.

Overall this project looks more like research than coding. I like it,
but I have few concerns:
1. Probably the final result will look very stupid, like "do
everything twice in any order, everything else doesn't matter". Though
it will be proved at least.
2. What to do next depends on results of the previous step. I'll
hardly be able to do very detailed plan.

So, do you think it's worth trying?