Shader Prototyping Frameworks I wonder if there exists any shader prototyping framework where I can debug (on cpu) my shaders, experiment with them and instantly see results and even write unit tests. The framework does not have to emulate rendering pipeline, compute only will do.
If you really need this level of debugging (spoiler: you don't, more on that later), AFAIK only NVIDIA's NSight can provide it. However, in order to remain interactive, you probably need two machines - one to actually run your shader, and the other to debug it - because stopping a GPU for debugging will - quite understandably - freeze the display of the computer, making it unusable.

One step down from that is RenderDoc and its ability to swap shaders in a capture on the fly, as well as step through Direct3D bytecode and inspect its registers (i.e. a virtual machine for the DXBC, it's most often sufficiently detailed to actually find shader bugs).

And what most graphics programmers do most days is simply what I like to call "your mom's debugger", which on the CPU means sprinkling your code with print statements with the intention of later reviewing the log; but in shaders, you just stuff your shader outputs with debug values instead and inspect those values. There are also ways to "print text" from shaders (for instance, this ShaderToy).