@mcc I didn't want to pollute your Cohost comments with this, but I like your choice of year-establishing images.

@mcc would you mind if I submitted this to Lobsters? I think it would be the type of content they like, but I also very much understand if you don't want to show up there

@mcc "you are very quick" someone somewhere

@mcc superb overview thanks for this!

@mcc thanks!

@mcc Interesting blog post!

I'm doubtful that WebGPU replace Vulkan in the sense that it adds a fair bit of overhead for the various safety checks, etc, and game engines, middleware, etc that are concerned about performance and/or access to the latest hardware features will want to avoid this abstraction.

I think it's more likely to replace OpenGL for software that wants a more modern GPU interface with a bit more safety, simplicity, and portability than Vulkan.

@mcc Thanks! This is such an excellent writeup. I'm going to have to give it a whirl!

@mcc I'm not a graphics programmer (the furthest I've gotten is software rendering with Canvas2D), but I found this to be an approachable and fun history lesson! Thank you for putting all that together @mcc !

@mcc

This is excellent. Took three sittings for me to read it but it was worth it!

You're a good writer. 😃

@mcc thinking about compiling rust to spir-v is making me nostalgic about haxe/hxsl (compiling shaders for flash :) )

@mcc I love programming so much

@mcc as someone rather involved in Khronos I feel a little called out 🤣 but honestly I can't say any of the history stuff is wrong. Anyway OpenXR is clearly lacking any of the weaknesses alluded to in opengl and Vulkan. 😉 (Honestly if anything we don't cater to the game engines enough, and then game engines mangle or at least hide our beautiful APIs...)

@mcc hey if it came out an hour ago, does it already have your “you made a mistake, it’s too late to fix it” library design bits somewhere there? :P

@mcc the bit of history about "big engines" enthusiastically embracing vulkan/dx12 looks like that from the outside, but at least for Unity it was almost completely the opposite internally. The whole engine around year 2014 was *completely* unsuited for vulkan/dx12/metal design (and still largely is today), given that most of renderer design was still based around OpenGL 2.0 / DX9 concepts. So how come you end up with APIs like Vulkan, with engine vendors on Khronos? "It's complicated" :/

@mcc I'm not sure which is worse news, that it's out now or that it's actually supposedly good *sigh*

@mcc excellent article, thanks a lot for the deep dive!

@mcc Exceptionally well written and the history was highly entertaining. I'll have to try out the rust examples now and commit to learning the shader language! Thanks for this!

@mcc

at least its not controlled by google

@mcc This toot needs a #rust #rustlang hashtag.

@mcc this is very good. Thanks for writing it!

@mcc Oh man! The Vulkan docs are one of the reasons I like it. They are so precise and complete I’ve written stuff after reading nothing but them! *Never* had that experience with GL, maybe with Metal. What Linux devices have you used that don’t run Vulkan? I think the older Pis or the old $150 netbook I had were the only exceptions I’ve run into.

@mcc this is a *really* good article, thanks for writing it.

@mcc looks like i successfully postponed writing an engine using Vulkan until i can actually just try webgpu instead

@mcc This seems about as correct as it is possible for a human to write an article like this. I think you just about got everything in there! Well done.

Two additions:

1. I've used Metal a lot, and WebGPU is definitely similar, with perhaps a few small extra warts that Metal handles a bit more smoothly. But for cross-platform availability, the small price is well worth it.
2. For native C or C++, you can also use wgpu just fine: Just use cargo to build a .a, and link that.

@mcc I've used a chunk of this outside of its usual context, WGPU as a native library import in Rust. It's pretty neat!

@mcc this is great and I think you managed to represent history close enough to the truth that you won't piss off anyone with deep knowledge of it (judging from my reaction, at least)

@mcc That was a pretty cool read, thank you!

@mcc Awesome writeup, I learned a lot!

@mcc This blog post is very good, thank you for writing it!

@mcc "WebGPU caters to the kind of person who thinks it might be fun to write their own raymarcher, without requiring every programmer to be the kind of person who thinks it would be fun to write their own implementation of `malloc`."

I actually laughed out loud

@mcc Your post really helped me understand a few things I had been confused about for a while, thank you very much!!! :)

@mcc this is an extremely good writeup

@mcc Great history of the API-s, brings back some memories (not doing 3D anymore..)! And now I have another great example why I switched from disliking Microsoft in the 90s to disliking Apple...

@mcc thank you! I read it and I thought it was great :)

@mcc I don’t think details will come out publicly but I want the inside scoop for what happened on WebKit shipping WebGPU behind a flag in 2019 but then pulling it a year or so later. I’m guessing someone had an unfun 2022 trying to get that back on track.

@mcc this is a wonderful little write-up and i'm really excited to see where things go with WebGPU! i might have to finally join the NPM hivemind ;_;

@mcc Great write-up. Even the footnotes are worth reading!

“Wait, do JS modules/import just work in browsers now? I don't even know lol”

(I had the same exact response about a month ago)

@mcc amazing article, thanks for sharing what you know

@mcc Thank you for this article. It was fun to read and contains so many helpful details!

@mcc great blog post -- I remember most of those graphics APIs from when they came out but it was helpful to see them all explained at once together (also I didn't know about WebGPU yet)

@mcc as someone who is still running Mojave on a 2013 MBP with discrete Nvidia card, this whole blogpost hits home.