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Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

Cross platform. You could build a rust app with a WebGPU target that runs across web and native.

Ah nice, I see. Any particular reason for Rust being used? Just curious, because I would (naively) expect to see similar projects with Golang, C++ etc but I really only see Rust.

This implementation is developed by firefox (at least, last I checked). Google has an implementation along similar lines in C++ called dawn, and I'm pretty sure webkit plans to use dawn. So you see them in Rust/C++, but no one has written an implementation in go afaik.

For all we know, Safari on Windows(!) is going to use Dawn. But anything on Apple platforms isn't quite clear. They may get their own implementation.

The Windows version of Safari was discontinued in 2012.

I think you meant WebKit on Windows (used for other browsers than Safari). Once Dawn is integrated in WebKit for one OS, it should be easy to extend WebKit to use it on other OSes so maybe it will be a quick way to have WebGPU implemented in Safari?

Thanks for correcting! For a moment I started wondering if I exposed any confidential info here, phew!

A Go implementation would only be usable from Go, whereas Rust and C++ can export a C API that many different languages can use.

Plus, using system libraries (DirectX, Villain, Metal, OpenGL) from Go would be a pain and possibly suffer worse from the FFI penalties than just using a higher level library written in Rust/C++ to begin with.

Rust is great for this!

Google has an implementation of WebGPU called Dawn, which is quite impressive. It's written in C++.

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