I'm really rooting for WebGPU as the "cross-platform 3D-API for the rest of us" (where "rest of us" is everybody who isn't a highly specialized rendering engineer in an AAA-game engine team).

There's "one small thing" I'd like to see in WebGPU for the native use case: an optional compile-time configuration feature which allows to pass in "backend-native" shaders so that all the runtime-shader-translation code isn't necessary.

Example size for compiling "Hello Triangle" on macOS before and after stripping, both using the Metal backend:

- with sokol-gfx: 95 KB, 91 KB

- with Google Dawn: 5.2 MB, 4.0 MB

I bet that most of that 4 MB overhead is coming from the integrated shader validation and translation code. I haven't tested with wgpu-native, but I guess the size overhead will be similar.

Since native applications don't need the strict shader validation of the web platform, this probably would also speed up pipeline creation a bit :)

PS: clarification, the executable size for Dawn is also using sokol-gfx but using its new WebGPU backend and statically linked against Dawn (which in turn is using its own Metal backend), so not a 'Hello Triangle' built directly on top of the webgpu.h API. The size difference should be negligible though (at most a few Kbytes more).