We use git branches to support shader compilation in the cloud. The dev branch contains only shader source files (in GLSL format), while the main branch contains generated shaders. On every push to the dev branch, a GitHub action runs which compiles the shaders and pushes those to main.
Thus, you can run piet-gpu from the main branch without requiring any shader compilation tools. Also, the dev branch has a relatively clean history, and PRs can be made against it without having to worry about merge conflicts in the generated shader files.
If you do want to make changes to the shaders, you'll need some tools installed:
The GitHub action runs on Windows so the DXC signing can succeed (note that [hassle-rs] may provide an alternate solution). We currently only compile to MSL on Metal, not AIR, due to tooling friction. The Metal shader compiler is available on Windows, but a barrier to running in CI is that downloading it appears to require an Apple account. Longer term we will want to figure out a solution to this, because the piet-gpu vision involves ahead-of-time compilation of shaders as much as possible.
Right now the scripts for compiling shaders are done in hand-written ninja files. This is likely to change, as the number of permutations will increase, and we also may want access to metadata from the shader compilation process.
Following a few general rules should hopefully keep things running smoothly:
dev branch, not main.main, it will cause divergence.