* In a previous update in 2021 many copyright ranges were truncated
accidentally, and some files have been copy-pasted with wrong years. These
dates have been fixed based on git history and original copyright messages.
* For very large shader symbol stores especially those on network drives, the
bad behaviour that PIX has to recursively search all possible subdirectories
and enumerate all files can be really slow. Most of the time a file is
identified by its hash filename and looked up directly - if that isn't a hit,
in many cases users would rather a fast exit to having no symbols.
* This is a string type which heavily optimises for immutability and minimal
storage. It only contains one pointer to the string data and always
reallocates on modify. For compile-time literals it doesn't modify or
allocate.
* On x64 we use the top bit in a tagged pointer to store a flag of whether it's
heap or literal, on other platforms it uses a separate field (meaning another
pointer sized value effectively, including padding).
* This is best for structured data which tends to use a lot of immutable strings
for type/name information, and only a few for actual string data (which are
only allocated once and aren't modified after that). Similarly we rarely want
to know only the size of any of these strings, we want the whole string so not
explicitly storing the size is not a big deal.
* Overall this reduces SDObject from 128 bytes to 80 bytes.
* For certain very large arrays it can be nice to defer generation of structured
data until it's needed, since often maybe only a handful of elements may be
needed (or commonly none at all).
* This allows persistent config storage and registering tweak variables that
works independent of the UI's configuration.
* Config vars can be debug only, which means they will be compiled out in stable
version releases. This allows for debug-logging tweaks that are available in
all builds (including nightly builds) for diagnostic purposes, but have zero
overhead in stable releases.
* Variables have a loose hierarchy defined with _ or . to separate nodes.
baldurk