SPIRV-Tools VS learnopengl-examples

SPIR-V is an intermediate bytecode format. That bytecode is the data that you use in the Vulkan API, and under the hood your graphics drivers compile that bytecode into the device-specific native shader binary that runs on the graphics hardware.

Vulkan doesn't come with any tools to generate that bytecode though. Foreign shader language (like HLSL, GLSL, etc) to SPIR-V compilers exist, and various graphics toolchains can generate SPIR-V. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools does have tools to validate and optimizing SPIR-V bytecode.

In that case, there is a linker in SPIR-V tools, though it doesn't use the syntax sugar for inlined functions like Metal3 does https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools, but again, that's kind of a higher level functionality

which is looking for https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools/releases/download/master-tot/SPIRV-Tools-master-osx-RelWithDebInfo.zip which yields a 404.

I would use SPIR-V Tools to disassemble the shader, and confirm that it's an issue in the on-disk shader binary. If you find that constant ID 9 on disk has size 4, then it's your shader loading that's going wrong; if it has size -1, then you need to look at why glslc has compiled your shader source with the wrong size.

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.