Build-time GLSL syntax validation

Question

Is there a way to validate GLSL syntax build-time instead of run-time? My application takes a long time to start and I want to know at the earliest possible stage that my shaders are ok. I'm using Visual Studio/Xcode. The solution probably involves running a tool as a part of build process, but I'm looking for such a tool.

Answer 1

NVIDIA's Cg Toolkit should be able to compile (or translate) shaders offline and spit errors. Another option is to create a tiny executable yourself that takes in a shader file and tries to compile it with your GPU driver's compiler (or perhaps such a compiler is already provided for you by the vendor). Though I think at least in the latter cases many compilers are too forgiving to catch all errors.

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