Dawn: A WebGPU Implementation

WebGPU is a much more approachable API than Vulkan or DirectX 12 and is more portable than either (or Metal, which is secretly the best graphics API available today if you can put up with Apple). If you're trying to hack something together or write something nominally portable like you could in the good old days of OpenGL, I'd recommend starting with WebGPU. *

However, it's not at all a viable replacement and it's not clear it has a path to become one in its current state. WebGPU is limited to a least common denominator of features that sets it back at least half a decade of hardware and API advancement. Some of these features (like raw pointers to buffers) would be challenging to adapt to the safety requirements expected of WebGPU.

Then, you have to consider that it's yet another layer of indirection on top of a stack that's already filled with more magic than any one developer or company can keep in their head(s). It's another layer removed from the driver written by hardware vendors, too, so hitting the fast paths gets a little harder. Plenty of devs are already hesitant to move from DX12 to Vulkan, so if they move to WebGPU, it'll start with baseline support for browsers and not much else, then maybe expand if WebGPU somehow goes deeper into the hardware stack.

* I need to asterisk this because, to be honest, I think the whole paradigm behind all these APIs is complete and utter garbage but that's a much longer conversation and has no obvious resolution in sight.

First they have to decide what they actually want WGSL to look like.

Currently it looks like C++, HLSL and Rust had a son, and they are still half way there.