wgslminify

Utility to minify and mangle WGSL, WebGPU shader code. When applying wgslminify, the shader code is tokenized and then several minification and mangling operations are applied. Output should be functionally equivalent to the original shader but smaller in text size.

Usage

Input is read from stdin or file. The resulting shader code is printed to stdout. The following options are available:

• -h or --help: displays the command line help
• -e: will exclude the identifiers given in the comma separated list from mangling
• --no-mangle: will completely skip the mangling process

Examples:

$ wgslminify -e vertexMain,fragmentMain,myVariable fullshader.wgsl

$ wgslminify --no-mangle computeshader.wgsl

$ cat fragment.wgsl | wgslminify --no-mangle >fragment_out.wgsl

Notes

Minification removes all kinds of comments, leading and trailing zeros of non-hexadecimal numeric literals (float and integer) and any unnecessary whitespaces. Mangling replaces all identifiers with short character sequences. Identifiers with most occurrences will receive the shortest sequences. Although not part of WGSL, JavaScript template literals (${...}) are detected and ignored during minification.

Limitations

• Only ASCII shader code is supported. (WGSL is as per default UTF-8.)
• Identifiers named like swizzle names (xyzw/rgba, including any combination of these) are not replaced currently. I.e. if there is a struct with a member named xxz, this member won't be mangled. This might be improved sometime soon.
• Other reductions are certainly possible, e.g. converting vec3<f32>(1.0, 1.0, 1.0) to vec3f(1).
• Likely there are other shortcomings and/or bugs. Testing was done only on a limited amout of shaders. Let me know if you find an issue!