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Comment by attilakun | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure but what you are suggesting is not outside the realm of possibility. There are already projects like https://makepad.dev/ which implement their GUI on top of WebGL. (Which is arguably more challenging than implementation on top of Canvas 2D.)

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Ran very smoothly for me. My only complaint is that right clicking doesn't offer a context menu, and that scroll bars don't allow snapping back to a previous position on Windows.

It would be interesting to see a project that allows integration of these native features into an otherwise canvas-like environment. Copying all the minutiae of OS features and quirks seems like an unending task.

I expected scrolling to feel janky and "non-native" but it was fine. Text rendering, on the other hand... it was a bit of a blurry mess, compared to Chrome's native rendering (on Ubuntu 21.04).

Ctrl+scrollwheel for zoom also doesn't work; this seems awful for accessibility.

Ran well for a few minutes on my iPhone, but froze up and then again after refresh. But very responsive and crisp. Obviously not yet optimized for touch devices; have to tap and hold the scrollbar to scroll, native iOS stuff didn’t come up after text selection. Very cool and while imperfect according to other comments, this is not bad at all.

Visiting that website made my laptop's fans start running.

If you look at the bottom left of the screen, it is live compiling/rendering a 3D particle swarm animation while you edit the code, so really not so surprising that it makes the machine work a bit.

On my laptop (a Core i7 Chromebook - fast but not crazy by HN standards) the fan runs for a half second at first load - presumably during the compilation step - then shuts off immediately.

try using a better web browser ?

Perfect example of the pitfalls this approach has. I'm on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ and visited that site using Chrome for Android. I can't enter text as the on-screen keyboard is never activated.

Easy to fix, but these are the sorts of edge cases a canvas-only solution is going to have to deal with.

That's amazing, the IDE itself and the shader preview running on a WebGL canvas. Thanks for sharing!

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