Compiling Vulkan shaders at runtime

In the previous recipes, we only covered OpenGL, while Vulkan was only mentioned a few times now and again. In the rest of this chapter, we will show you how to create a Vulkan rendering application with functionality similar to what we've done with OpenGL so far. The code from this and the subsequent recipes will be reused later to build more complex Vulkan demos.

Before we start using Vulkan, we must learn how to significantly speed up the iterative process of writing shaders. Vulkan consumes shaders in their final compiled binary form, called SPIR-V, and it uses a standalone shader compiler to precompile shaders offline. While being perfect for a released product, this approach slows down early stages of graphics application development and rapid prototyping, where shaders are changed a lot and should be recompiled on each application run. In this recipe, we will show you how to compile Vulkan shaders at runtime using Kronos' reference...