This is a good suggestion and is what we've been considering to add.
Currently there is already the slang-reflection-test code (that is compiled as a library) that does exactly this, and you can change the code slightly to compile that dll as an exe instead. But it would be useful to package them up directly in slangc.

If no one is working on it I can try implementing it. Shouldn't be that hard with the reflection API already in place.

That will be fantastic. We appreciate your contribution! You can get started by taking a look at \tools\slang-reflection-test\slang-reflection-test-main.cpp, which should already have all the logic we want: reads the refection data, and print them out as json string.

So basically:

• move most of the reflection test code to the main codebase
• hook up the code in slangc with a compiler option
• add the option to the documentation

Right?

Yes, that should be it.

How can I run the tests to ensure I don't break anything?

You can run slang-test from repository root directory without any parameters:

slang-test

To speed things up you can run tests in parallel with:

slang-test -use-test-server -server-count 12

To run tests with specific name:

slang-test tests/compute/simple.slang

To run test using a specific API:

slang-test -api d3d12

slang-test -api all-wgpu # run tests using all apis but wgpu.

I like to recommend checking out our contribution guide.
https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/blob/master/CONTRIBUTION.md