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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Who needs a "next generation WebGL?" It's hard to find an interesting or useful WebGL site. There are plenty of demos and ads, but few sites worth visiting.

Here, go shoot some zombies.

http://www.y8.com/games/abandoned_island

That's about as good as it gets.

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Same was said about sound, Javascript, web video, and pretty much any addition on top of basic markup.

I think future web will be better and/or can consume less power when sites have more direct control of rendering.

Emphasis on power usage -- I think they (= browser vendors) should give a lot of consideration how to enable developers to save power. Web rendering is already mainly done on GPUs anyways, but there's opportunity to push less pixels to achieve the same results as the current rendering methods. Pushing less pixels equals less power. Of course passive power savings (from developers' point of view) are also good.

WebGL must also not perceptibly increase page load times, a few milliseconds is acceptable.

If the features turn out to be useful, when reliable WebGL is ubiquitous, various javascript libraries will start to use it and number of sites using WebGL will increase rapidly.

WebGL must also not perceptibly increase page load times, a few milliseconds is acceptable.

Almost every non-trivial WebGL page I've seen shows a "Loading" message for some period of time.

Well, I meant just fixed base cost in milliseconds. In other words, how long it takes to just output something extremely simple, say, a flat shaded triangle without external libraries. Not to measure resource loading and other initialization.

Of course initialization and possible shader language, SPIR or whatever compilation will take time on top of that.

Many current WebGL apps require a lot of large data, textures, meshes and libraries. Obviously loading those will take time.

Flash had an scheduled loading scheme, so the timeline specified when an asset would be sent as you played a Flash animation. Macromedia had authoring tools which would try to slot the assets in the timeline so they'd be available when needed, while staying under a bandwidth limit.

You could, in theory, do that with WebGL. Google is all fired up about "preloading" lately. This is an authoring tool problem, and if WebGL games get serious, there will probably be author-side tools for this.

One look at today's web should tell you how much developers get paid for conserving power, as opposed to adding bling.

Which is why I only do web dev when I get paid to do it, for me programming for fun means native applications.

Google maps doesn't work without WebGL, and some other map related websites like mappilary.

Right, but the proposal is about an API which lets web applications do shader-language stuff beyond the level of WebGL. Is this really necessary?

The new APIs (Vulkan, DX12, Metal) are mostly about performance. I can't think of any major thing that you can't implement in WebGL. But, a portable 3d API would be awesome for native apps. And, why not have that be the 3d API for the web too? Like WebGL / OpenGL ES 2.

It seems to work in Firefox with WebGL disabled.

Why on Earth (no pun intended) should Google Maps require WebGL?

Another example of people losing focus on providing actual value with the products they make.

Phones.

It's really the only way forward for widely accessible GPU programming, since the native scene is so fragmented and such a kaleidoscope of OS-crashing buggy drivers. Of course it's possible that will remain a niche thing, but with the just arrived WebGL 2 and imminently arriving shared memory in Web Workers there's a lot of new possiblities opening up. All this AI-on-GPU stuff that's in the headlines lately, for example.

The recently discussed Qt remote WebGL app feature is a nice example that you can do even with WebGL 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13744631)

Also a lot of non-game 3D customers historically have been inhouse scientific / data visualization users. I suspect many of those are already moving to WebGL & internal web apps, but you won't see them much on public web sites.

It took a good while for interesting or useful JS apps to arrive too...

It is not easy to pull of impressive things with an API that is lagging 10 years behind what is available on desktop while fighting all kinds of browser idiosyncrasies.

We've got those super powerful processors that can be one or two orders of magnitude faster than CPUs, but their performance is mostly wasted because there is no way to do general compute on GPUs in browsers.

But even so, there are still some pretty cool things being done with WebGL:

https://www.shadertoy.com/ http://glslsandbox.com/

Medical imaging comes to mind. Probably lots of other stuff. Ikea and others already have those kitchen planners, they can still be improved a lot.

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