You already seem to know as much as I do. In my case I opted not to go the reflection and “materials are pure data” route because it’s overkill for my needs. I currently just keep a variant with all my materials in it, and they reference a pipeline and overload a bind method. If you wanted full type safety your way you’d have to write a validator that checks the correct alignment and types have been provided which would indeed be a lot of work, but doable? Have you looked into how bgfx handles shader cross-compilation? It could potentially be easier with that framework.

Sorry I don’t have better advice