gpuweb VS webgl2-voxels

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)

You got me wondering what was going on - 425Kb seemed pretty high. I imagined there would only be around 50K of non-compressed source code. Turns out the 200Kb+ culprit is the texture atlas I nabbed off the internet: https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels/blob/master/res/m... - I'm only using a handful of cells out of that, I should chop it!

This is really cool, and I love the idea of embedding assets around the web. When I first saw PlayCanvas years ago I kind of ignored it... but it just keeps going and just gets more and more feature-filled. Now it really seems like a solid product - and a solid idea... Well done to the creators!

Does anyone know who PlayCanvas are? (And are they hiring?!) I love WebGl and WebGl2 (here's a little Minecraft thing I made: https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels), so for my own projects I always want to do it all "from scratch". But this is a much more productive engine and that playground is really tempting me to dive in further.