wgpu-native VS angle

The Mach engine project has prebuilt Dawn libraries and also a simplified build-from-source process using the Zig build system, see:

https://machengine.org/pkg/mach-gpu-dawn/

It's also possible to use wgpu-native in C/C++ projects as prebuilt library, see:

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native

It is based on the wgpu-native implementation (Firefox backend) but I plan on adding a receipe for using it with Dawn (Chrome backend) as well.

go-webgpu provides binding for wgpu-native (a safe and portable GPU abstraction in Rust, implementing WebGPU API).

Rust, C++

When you look at graphics APIs in Rust practically everything is pointing towards, and telling you to use, wgpu, which abstracts over Vulkan, Metal, DX11/12, GLES and WebGPU and is based on, drumroll, WebGPU. Hardly surprising as it's the backend firefox is going to use. And yes it has a C API, too.

Probably the easiest option would be to target wgpu-native prebuilt binaries but these don't have iOS/Android (unsure if wgpu-native supports iOS/Android at all)

WGPU is the underlying implementation for WebGPU in Firefox and it has C bindings: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native.git.

It's using MoltenVK on Mac for Vulkan compatibility, and ANGLE for OpenGL compatibility on Windows and Linux. Makes you wonder what it's actually doing itself.

Can't they use https://github.com/google/angle?

BTW. For the last 15 years, all web browsers on Windows do WebGL on top of DirectX (using the Angle library https://github.com/google/angle).

You can still use OpenGL. Just not the vendor provided drivers. They are indeed horrible. There are libraries like:

* ANGLE ( https://github.com/google/angle ) - An OpenGL ES implementation with Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, Desktop GL, GL ES, Vulkan and Metal backends. This is what we used to use for shipping our Qt 3D application, that used a bunch of OpenGL Shaders. We used to get bug reports about various shaders not working properly on various hardware. After switching to this, all those bug reports vanished.

* Zinc ( https://www.supergoodcode.com/do-not/ ) - A more recent, OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. I haven't used this one yet. But they are making a lot of progress and it is almost as performant as vendor provided OpenGL Drivers these days. So if I ever have to ship a desktop app, needing opengl, I'd strongly consider using this.

Another option if perf isn't a big concern is to try using Google's angle OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation, there's backends for it to be supported on Vulkan, Direct3D 11, and (work in progress) Metal. Disclosure, haven't tried it myself, just looking at their feature descriptions: https://github.com/google/angle

I don't believe Chrome uses OpenGL directly- any OpenGL usage it does have (e.g. for WebGL) is actually going through ANGLE which translates it all to D3D on Windows.

RTFM, have you read their instruction