gpuweb VS Flutter

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)

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/

You can find the React Native documentation here and Flutter Documentation here.

[1]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55092#issuecomment...

> There is actually a great issue thread on the Flutter GitHub that explains exactly why other solutions do not work correctly when compared to hooks [0]

Interesting. I assume you are referring to this comment in particular -> https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/51752#issuecomment... ?