Using GLSL 3.00 ES

luma.gl makes it easy to write portable applications that work with the latest WebGL APIs (WebGL2 components and methods in JavaScript and GLSL 3.00 ES in shaders), by providing a modern JavaScript components and transparently handling differences between WebGL and GLSL versions.

Automatic GLSL Code Transpilation

If one wishes to use GLSL 3.00 features in a shader, one has to make modifications to the shader so that it no longer runs on GLSL 1.00 code. For a small monolithic shader it may be less of an issue (e.g. if you need WebGL2 features, use GLSL 3.00, otherwise GLSL 1.00) but if the goal is to create reusable shader code that can run under both WebGL1 and WebGL2 and both in GLSL 1.00 and GLSL 3.00 shaders, then there are problems.

Textual replacement

The required modifications are very simple, and can mostly be done by a (fairly) simple series of textual replacements, as detailed in the proposal below.

Fragment Shader Outputs

The major complication is related to fragment shader outputs, that use built-in gl_fragColor/gl_fragData[] variables in GLSL 1.00, but must be declared as variables in GLSL 3.00. And any variable starting with gl_ is reserved, so names must be changed.

Shader Assembler knows the target version of GLSL.
It applies as series of regular expressions (different between vertex and fragment shader) to replace basic constructs.
Users will need to avoid WebGL2 constructs if they wish their shaders to compile

Table of replacements

Converting from GLSL 3.00 to 3.00

To enable portable code to be written, we must allow some non-conformant code in GLSL 3.00.

Most importantly, texture in GLSL 3.00 might translate to either texture2D or textureCube in GLSL 1.00. Therefor we allow textureCube to be used in GLSL 3.00 code but automatically change it to texture.

Converting from GLSL 3.00 to 1.00

Vertex Shader

in -> attribute - only beginning of line
out -> varying - only beginning of line

Fragment Shader

in -> varying - only beginning of line
out -> gl_fragColor/gl_fragData[] - only beginning of line, remove declaration

Common

texture -> texture2D

Converting from GLSL 1.00 to 3.00