Feature Request: Add Minification Support for WGSL Output

[hectoreccles]

Summary

When bundling, it would be useful to automatically generate minified WGSL shader code to reduce bundle size.

Proposed Functionality

Minification could be implemented in multiple levels of complexity:

1. Basic Minification

• Strip whitespace, newlines, and comments.

2. Variable Renaming

• Rename variables to shorter (e.g., single-character) names.

3. Function Renaming

• Rename functions while ensuring that corresponding entry points in JavaScript are also updated.

4. Advanced Minification

• Remove redundant syntax such as verbose type constructors and unnecessary parentheses.

Examples

Before

const TRIANGLE_VERTICES = array<vec2<f32>, 3>(
    vec2<f32>(1.0, 0.0),
    vec2<f32>(-0.5, 0.3),
    vec2<f32>(-0.5, -0.3)
);

After

const TRIANGLE_VERTICES = array(
    vec2(1.0, 0.0),
    vec2(-0.5, 0.3),
    vec2(-0.5, -0.3)
);

Additional Considerations

• Redundant parentheses: Can be safely removed in most expressions.
• Floating-point literals:
  • In all my test cases, .1 appears to work the same as 0.1.
  • Based on testing, appending .0 to integers isn't necessary (e.g., 1.0 → 1).

Motivation

Automated WGSL minification can significantly reduce bundle size and improve shader load times, particularly for projects with many shaders or large shader libraries.

[mighdoll]

@hectoreccles when you have a program that you want to shrink down, please share that too. Then we can measure improvement on real case.
We've talked about other ideas related to bundle size like #92 that might be relevant depending on the size of your program. Also, noting that the proposed browser source maps will be helpful to have so that minified shaders are still debuggable.

[hectoreccles]

Apologizes for getting back to you late @mighdoll. The project I was planning on using it on is this one here https://github.com/hectoreccles/boids-js however in more recent PRs I have replaced wesl-js with TypeGPU as WESL tooling isnt quite there yet.

[mighdoll]

sounds good, and also please keep an eye out for ideas and issues on bridging TypeGPU and WESL. We've prototyped a few integration ideas together and it'd be nice to to have a real example project like yours when we turn back to that integration.