Feedback Are shaders being compiled efficiently?

I had a thought. Say you had some program "shadercompiler". Which could compile a shader like this from command prompt:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. >shadercompiler myshader.shader

Now an inefficient way of compiling 3 shaders would be:

Code (CSharp):

1. >shadercompiler shader1.shader
2. >shadercompiler shader2.shader
3. >shadercompiler shader3.shader

Whereas an efficient way might be:

Code (CSharp):

1. >shadercompiler -batch shader1.shader shader2.shader shader3.shader

Because it would only involve loading the program shadercompiler from the HD one time and running it.
Thus if the program "shadercompiler" could compile 3 shaders one after another, would this be significantly faster?

I have a feeling Unity is doing it the first way, seeing as how it is counting when it has done each shader which seems like it wouldn't be able to do in a batch compilation.

That might be a problem if your IDE uses a lot of 3rd party tools.

If the program "compileshader" couldn't do batch compilation there would be two solutions:

• ask the 3rd party tool maker to support it
• load the program onto a RAM disk if it is being run many times
• have a built in shader compiler in the IDE

These are just my thoughts about how a program like Unity might more efficiently compile hundreds of shaders. But perhaps they do this already.

I suppose a bottleneck would also be writing the compiled shader to HD. But this might be done on a separate thread perhaps. Or saving all the shaders in RAM and then writing them all at once to HD in one big go.