gpuweb VS EtherCalc

People keep spreading this incredibly misleading statement, and yours is even more misleading (suggesting Apple opposed a 'GPU WASM')

By all accounts, Apple's /only/ stance was that if WebGPU used SPIR-V it would be a non-starter for them, due to ongoing legal issues between Apple and Khronos.

Apple actually proposed WebHLSL in collaboration with Microsoft, to have HLSL be the standard.

Mozilla employee's stance[0] was that SPIRV was too low level, did not fit with the goals of WebGPU portability and security, and expressed concern that Khronos may add functionality to SPIRV they cannot support in WebGPU like raytracing instructions .. 'So we'd always be on the verge of forking SPIR-V in some way.'

It was also noted by many people that even if a bytecode format was used, it would still have to be translated to the target (HLSL/DXIL, MSL, etc.) in almost the same way a text format would.

Nobody proposed a 'GPU WASM equivalent' or an alternative bytecode format.

The hard truth is that shader compilation is a fucking nightmare, people do not realize how bad it is across the different native APIs. SPIR-V is good, but it doesn't solve that - and presents other challenges if you are a web browser API. Vulkan and SPIRV are not the golden goose many make them out to be.

[0] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/847#issuecomment-642...

Yes it is still a bit new. WebGPU is not finished and is still being worked on: https://webgpu.io/

WebGPU currently doesn't support the "bindless" resource access model (see: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/380).

The "max number of sampled texture per shader stage" is a runtime device limit, and the minimal value for that seems to be 16. So texture atlasses are still a thing in WebGPU.

There's even an implementation under discussion to have the dp4a instruction added to WebGPU (https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/2677)

Somewhat random, but spreadsheets continued to evolve after VisiCalc (obviously).

Here is one by the inventor of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin, on github: https://github.com/DanBricklin/socialcalc

Audrey Tang (who happens to currently serve as the Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan)) created the Node.js port of SocialCalc, EtherCalc: https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc

Audrey made a fascinating write up of SocialCalc for The Architecture of Open Source Applications https://aosabook.org/en/v1/socialcalc.html

if you need office stuff ON CLOUD then no idea there are several random ones like https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc (demo on top right the website works fine and is multi-user collab) and there are libreoffice ones that work in cloud too, though using them in browser never really made sense to anything I've seen. I've never been to any office or consulted anywhere that multi-user actually helped anyone.

I think there's several possible solutions: * No-code/low-code database platforms (e.g., NocoDB) * Personal finance manager (e.g., Firefly III) * Spreadsheets (e.g., CryptPad for a full office suite or Ethercalc) * Task management systems (e.g., Vikunja)

Office solutions (e.g., spreadsheets): CryptPad and EtherCalc

ethercalc: supports editing by multiple clients simultaneously. Pretty easy to setup.

Try CryptPad or EtherCalc.

Ethercalc, although a bit dated, works ok on docker https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc