gpuweb VS wgpu-rs

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/

There's a proposal for a "WebGPU compatibility mode" which also works on older devices:

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/4266

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)

Shared memory, yes, with the goodies: atomics and barriers. We rely on that heavily in Vello, so we've pushed very hard on it. For example, WebGPU introduces the "workgroupUniformLoad" built-in, which lets you broadcast a value to all threads in the workgroup while not introducing potential unsafety.

Tensor cores: I can't say there are plans to add it, but it's certainly something I would like to see. You need subgroups in place first, and there's been quite a bit of discussion[1] on that as a likely extension post-1.0.

[1]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/3950

Naga-based shader infrastructure has been growing and capturing more ground. It has reached an important point where SPIRV-Cross is not just optional on some platforms, but even not enabled by default. This is now the case for Metal and OpenGL backends. Naga path is easier to integrate, share types with, compile, and it’s much faster to run. Early benchmarks suggest about 2.5x perf improvement over SPIRV-Cross for us.

wgpu-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs) is probably closer to what you're looking for, it's a "high level wrapper" over wgpu-core (Which implements "WebGPU", an upcoming browser API for graphics using gfx-rs, and AIUI "implements" means this is what a browser might use to actually call a graphics API when javascript uses webGPU, although if you're compiling for wasm it could just call the browser APIs). It can run natively, ignore the fact it has "Web" in the name

rust-gpu) is used for compiling a compute shader written in Rust to SPIR-V. wgpu-rs is used natively for running the GPU computation.

For web assembly there is the unofficial bevy_webgl2 plugin. Official bevy web assembly support would probably use the wgpu webgl backend, which still needs some work, and is currently untested in bevy.

We let wgpu https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-rs handle our graphics backend abstraction, so our OpenGL support will come whenever they implement and release it. Currently, it seems to be a WIP.

Same as with GLSL, isn't it? What we do in wgpu-rs examples, and that's something I expect to see more widely, is having an integration test that just parses all the WGSL in the project and reports errors. Ideally though, we'd have a set of IDE plugins to do the parsing and report errors right where you type the code. We'd appreciate any help to get these started!

Also you could use an existing cross-platform graphics library, e.g. wgpu-rs. It supports Vulkan, Metal, DirectX, OpenGL and WebGPU. Oh and it seems to allow switching backends at compile-time via the WGPU_BACKEND environment variable, so maybe check out how they're doing it.

there is a lack of opengl development because opengl itself is beint phased out slowly. your best bet here is probably https://wgpu.rs