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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

And still SpectorJS as the only debugging tool available, far behind native GPGPU debugging tools.

Does this diminish the results of all browsers shipping decent WebGL 2.0 support, though?

It implies industry has little interest in actually supporting it. A GPU debugger is a critical tool in modern GPU development.

Maybe they are holding on webgpu. People are carefully optimistic in it becoming the one API to be actually cross-platform.

Maybe. It's not like the market for native graphical debugging tools is overflowing with options either, which is why I didn't understand OP's point that well.

Additionally, with some careful coding you can already run WASM+WebGPU applications both natively (e.g. via wgpu-rs) and in the browser, so you can pick and choose the best tooling depending on your use case, so ultimately I guess that's going to be the way forward.

> People are carefully optimistic in it becoming the one API to be actually cross-platform.

idk I'm shipping code that uses the Qt RHI which works on D3D, GL, Metal, Vk ... cross-platform enough for me.

Besides what fsloth replied, it is also 10 years too late, WebGL 2.0 is a subset of GL ES 3.0, released in 2010.

So in 10 years, no browser vendor ever thought it was worthwhile improving their developer tools to support 3D developers.

Firefox did have a toy debugger that they eventually killed and that was it.

Safari did.

WebGL was my first exposure to gpu programming - when I eventually wrote a D3D11 renderer I simply could not believe how much better the tools were. My advice to anyone wanting to learn graphics programming is to start with D3D, the debugging experience is at least 10x better, which makes the whole process so much less painful.

I did my graduation thesis porting a particle engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows using OpenGL, so you can imagine how long I follow OpenGL.

The state of tooling on Khronos APIs is just terrible, there is always this "community should do it" and naturally they are always a shadow of what commercial API SDKs offer in capabilities.

To the point that I think if Khronos was responsible for the Internet only IP would have been standardized.

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