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Unrelated, but someone also told me about clang ext_vector_type recently, and it's awesome stuff! Lvalue swizzles! clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageE

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How often do you really need swizzles to be lvalues? What exactly would you expect &foo.zyx to mean?

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most common would be assignment of a single component eg foo.z = 0. Expect same semantics as shading languages! :)

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Most code only needs single-component lvalues and strict-prefix rvalues (xy, xyz, ...). Latter also handled by downcast constructors.

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Remaining cases add language complexity for a surprisingly small number of uses (in code I've surveyed).

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&foo.zyx can't occur in current shaders: no pointers. Problem is it can't possibly be a float3* - wrong layout/order in mem.