We may also want to consider simply getting rid of the SPIRV-Tools dependency. Parsing SPIR-V isn't that complicated, the SPIRV-Tools dependency has always been a bit of a pain, and it would simplify things a bit for Wine's usage of vkd3d.
I guess. I'd rather submit this patch than spend time writing a SPIR-V parser, though. We'd also lose validation that way.
True. The point is mostly that SPIRV-Tools never was a particularly great fit for vkd3d-shader; we use it because it's what's available. I'm not aware of better alternatives, but we'd likely switch if we found one. Similarly, if someone were to contribute a SPIR-V parser to vkd3d-shader, there's a good chance it would make it upstream.
Unless we were to import into the source; that seems decidedly dispreferable, but it's not the first time I've tried to express that preference.
I'd rather not do that either, no.