Add menu item in IntelliJ to trigger caching shaders

[jacob314]

See
https://flutter.dev/docs/perf/rendering/shader
flutter run --profile --cache-sksl
flutter run --profile --cache-sksl --purge-persistent-cache

See Flutter bug
flutter/flutter#54287
Fyi @DanTup to add matching functionality in IDEs.
TBD: what should the menu item be called?

[devoncarew]

Is this a menu item? A setting in a launch configuration? Some other UI entry-point?

[DanTup]

If I understand correctly, the workflow is like this:

• Run the app with the flags above
• Exercise all of the shaders
• Invoke some command that dumps the shaders to a fie
• Pass that file as a black to flutter build to use the prebuilt shaders

So I think there needs to be an easy way to run the app with the extra flags in addition to the button to dump the shaders? For VS Code that first part may be difficult without some way of launching "the current launch config with some additional args" (requested in microsoft/vscode#47122) which may mean the user having to add the flags manually.

[devoncarew]

Invoke some command that dumps the shaders to a file

Is this command in the app itself? From the CLI tool?

I don't know how nailed down the workflow is, but it seems that:

• running flutter run with an additional 'profile shaders' cli arg makes sense
• that could do something like just continuously keep a shaders profile file up-to-date, so whatever you exercise in the app is reflected in the file

That would avoid having to run a second cli command while the first app was running.

[DanTup]

The instructions say to press "M" at the command line, but I presume it's a VM Service extension or similar that the IDEs could call.

There is a --write-sksl-on-exit flag to flutter drive that I guess allows you to automate this in a test. I wonder if the same could be done here (as long as it's opt-in, otherwise you might overwrite a big cache with a small cache, or deal with invalidation/expiration of the older ones)?

[jacob314]

at least in some cases you have to add --purge-persistent-cache if you want to clear the old cache.
If this becomes a core part of user workflows to avoid shader compilation jank we will need to connect the loop with either console errors or devtools support when users hit uncached shaders.