gpuweb VS krustlet

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)

Oh it’s certainly looking like that IMO.

You can run wasm in k8s: https://krustlet.dev/

Docker itself can run wasm: https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/docker-without-containers/

There are a few serverless runtimes based on wasm: https://wasmcloud.com/

A lot of those are powered by wasmtime or WasmEdge.

If you’re wanting to be able to just pull down a random app and run it as wasm, that’s inherently harder with wasm, because you have to recompile, and amazing compiling stuff is always harder than it should be. For example I compiled jq to wasm to other day, so you dont have to worry (as much) about the CVEs that was issued recently. https://github.com/rockwotj/jq-wasi

It can, kubevirt is a project for running VMs https://kubevirt.io/ and there have been more esoteric things like WASM (https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet).

Or you can run Krustlet instead of Kubelet. That makes it so you can only run WebAssembly on the cluster - so no Go, no Python, only Rust!

But the project seems to have died: https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet/graphs/contributors

There are some cloud providers that are starting to offer wasm support. Docker is currently working on wasm https://docs.docker.com/desktop/wasm/ There is also krustlet https://krustlet.dev/ which lets you run wasm in kubernetes

> If one writes Go or Rust, there are much better ways to run them than targeting WASM

wasm has its place, especially for contained workloads that can be wrapped in its strict capability boundaries (think, file-encoding jobs that shouldn't access anything else but said files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29112713).

> Containers are still the defacto standard.

wasmedge [0], atmo [1], krustlet [2], blueboat [3] and numerous other projects are turning up the heat [4]!

[0] https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge

[1] https://github.com/suborbital/atmo

[2] https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet

[3] https://github.com/losfair/blueboat

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30155295