gpuweb VS simple-game

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)

I have a somewhat naive version of this sort of system running via wgpu, but that's likely lower level than you'd want to go.

I won't claim this is great code, but poke around a little bit at my wgpu code and get a sense for how it compares to OpenGL. Overall the concepts are pretty close to each other, it's just that you declare everything up front instead of poking at OpenGL via functions to set things to the state you want.

It's really not that bad. I had some complaints about WGSL a few months ago but it was surprising how quickly it improved. Here are some simple real-world shaders you can look at:

https://github.com/bschwind/simple-game/tree/9de179085a04dd4...

If you combine it with a quick build step to give you shader compilation errors before your program runs, it becomes a pretty nice shading language. There are still a few rough edges but it's not _that_ bad to work with.

Thanks! I ended up going that route here