gpuweb VS rust-gpu

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)

Sounds cool, but this requires yet another language to learn[0]. As someone who only has limited knowledge in this space, could someone tell me how comparable is the compute functionality of rust-gpu[1], where I can just write rust?

[0] https://github.com/Hugobros3/shady#language-syntax

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

I don't do anything related to data science, but I feel like doing it in Rust would be nice.

You get operator overloading, so you can have ergonomic matrix operations that are typed also. Processing data on the CPU is fast, and crates like https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu make it very ergonomic to leverage the GPU.

I like this library for creating typed coordinate spaces for graphics programming (https://github.com/servo/euclid), I imagine something similar could be done to create refined types for matrices so you don't do matrix multiplication matrices of invalid sizes

Do you mean rust-gpu?

And https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu/tree/main/examples with the wgpu runner (here it runs the compute shader)

I don't know how major they are considered, but Embark Studios is doing quite a bit of Rust in the open source space, most notably (IMO) rust-gpu and kajiya

The examples in the rust-gpu repository are a good place to start

There's another project that's similar that's being used by an actual game company: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

They see specific advantages here that would outweigh that negative. It's not my space (I play games, but know next to nothing about graphics programming), but there's at least one argument in the other direction.

Could this approach work for compute shaders (GPGPU) as well? So far, I think https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu is the state of the art in that area, but it adds a specific Rust compiler backend for generating SPIR-V rather than leaving that up to the driver. That seems more complicated than it needs to be... but maybe it has advantages too? Thoughts?

https://github.com/embarkstudios/rust-gpu Allows you to create shaders (kernals) in Rust.

Also Embark Studios (formers DICE people) is doing a lot of work with Rust, all open source like Rust GPU https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu