Live reloading shaders? about regl

[jeffawang]

Ah, nice. This seems like just what I need. Props to you for the quick answer and proof of concept 😄 !

[rreusser]

If you reuse the same regl instance, you can write:

draw = regl({
  vert: regl.prop('vert'),
  frag: regl.prop('frag'),
  ...
})

and then call it with

draw({ vert: myVertSource, frag: myFragSource })

On each call it will do a string comparison of the source and only recompile if the source has changed. Relatively speaking, it should be quite performant (the string comparison is the only downside, but that shouldn't be too significant. If it were, I guess you could always throw a serial counter in a comment near the top of the source just to early-return from the comparison asap).

The main thing is to definitely avoid recreating the entire regl instance from scratch if you can, and also try to avoid recreating the regl command if you can, since that's still moderately expensive.

Just to double-check I wasn't giving bad advice, I made a notebook here to demonstrate: https://observablehq.com/d/79823713d23613cd