gpuweb VS learn-wgpu

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)

Nice.

Speaking of Snake game, if you want to go even deeper, you can try to use the wgpu crate to combine Rust and WebGPU to write everything from scratch. Here is the tutorial:

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/#what-is-wgpu

I once wrote a code editor with wgpu, from font rendering to char/line state management (very rough) for music live coding:

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-wgpu

It runs in browsers, even including Safari!

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ This is probably the best resource out there for learning wgpu specifically. If you're unfamiliar with graphics, the learnopengl one is good. If you've got experience though, jumping right into that one is a shout or looking at some vulkan ones as they're pretty similar in terms of architecture.

- https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu

Most of The WGPU I learnt is from https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ but it doesn't really talk about designing n stuff, I thought of checking out the source code for Bevy or even games like veloren. But well, their codebases are pretty big to get started in the first place.

So I was wondering if opting for option 1 would be better to begin with. OpenGL has a much bigger community and wgpu only has its documentation which I hear is not quite up there yet. There is this excellent tutorial for wgpu that I read through, but it seems like wgpu can be a lot more complicated than starting with OpenGL.

I started with wgpu tutorial (https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/) since I like the idea of portability and it's a Rust-first library, but it seems I'm missing some foundations of how CG works in general: the code is given, a little of explanation like it assumes I already know something, maybe I'm wrong, but I wish there was a longer explicit version.

If you haven't seen it: https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ is a good introduction that will explain most of what you asked, then can refer to rend3d or bevys renderer to see how a render graph works.