makepad VS gpuweb

It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681

> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.

Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrod to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup.

What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere.

And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.

[0] https://github.com/makepad/makepad

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4FCS-oMpg

For those who haven’t seen it, Makepad is also an in-browser code editor with an open-source UI toolkit. Looks like this synth is one of the examples of the UI toolkit.

https://makepad.dev/

And I'm obsessed with what happens when you press Alt in their editor. I never knew I wanted this, but boy, do I want it.

I tried this, using https://makepad.dev our GPU accelerated UI and renderstack. And unfortunately it wasn't a great experience. Text popping forward for whatever reason is not really an improvement (i tried indent depth, syntax highlighting reasons, cursor behavior). Maybe 'veeeeery' subtly could do something, but otherwise you dont want it to break visual symmetry as we are used to

Wow, so they did: https://github.com/makepad/makepad/pull/142

It says on the front page Mac and Web only

https://github.com/makepad/makepad#prerequisites

(windows and linux are coming )

We can! It’s a lot of work because you don’t have the whole JS ecosystem to fall back on, but to some that’s a feature not a bug.

My favorite example of this is https://makepad.dev

And a feature highlight of Code Lens. The idea is borrowed from https://github.com/makepad/makepad

When it comes to compile times, the most optimized Rust codebase I know for optimized for this is makepad.dev [1].

It is compiling from scratch on mac m1 in around 7.5s [2] and that's +100k lines of Rust. However there is close to none dependencies, so this +100k is all there is to compile pretty much.

[1] https://makepad.dev/

[2] https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1467529091284934666

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)