Hacker News Reader

Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think your examples are both genuinely less comprehendible to someone without a deep understanding of GL going in than my example.

It’s a very bad, non-object oriented API in an object oriented language. It was designed for and by people who know GL in other C like languages, not for people who know JavaScript. It is unlike any other part of the language.

The fact that I have to write a shader myself, as a fricken string like I’m writing SQL over here, just to draw a triangle is absurd. There should at the very least be some sort of provided builder for simple shaders.

View on HN

Yeah, they probably are, I didn't intend them as tutorials but as a better representation of the actual scutwork necessary to draw a triangle.

Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/trama. If you want to run them on the GPU you need a language that exposes the GPU's capabilities.

In essence your primary complaint is that the GPU instruction set is not object-oriented (and neither is your database). Well, you can design your own GPU, but I've got some bad news for you about Verilog, Chisel, and BlueSpec! And you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented, so your OO GPU will end up underperforming, like the Burroughs B5000 and the Symbolics 3600 (hopefully not as badly as the Intel iAPX432). You'll probably have more success writing an object-oriented database.

However, I do agree that WebGL is a bad API, because boilerplate is never acceptable.

> you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented

I am saving this quote for future use. Thank you :)

Funny, I would argue that the rock on my table is very definitely an object ;)

But even if we're arguing physics, that's debatable. The shape and toughness of the rock are actually an effect of forces between the atoms composing the rock, and the weight of the rock is actually the interaction between the mass of the rock and the earth. The color of the rock is the effect of the interaction between the molecules in the rock and photons (which are themselves wave-like) and then the interaction between that light and the cells in your eyes.

Objects are a convenient day-to-day model in real life and software, but there are more "functional" models that comprise the object model.

Examine it more closely; you will find that it is a dynamical system composed of sextillions of parts, constantly entering and leaving the rock, and that the boundaries between the rock, the table, and the air are very fuzzy indeed. It isn't even encapsulated, nor are its interactions with its environment mediated by messages to which it freely chooses a response; it is its environment.

Your insight is remarkably well-written. I wish we could see our bodies in the same way, all of the time. The world might be a kinder place overall. Do you meditate?

Not enough to be useful. But I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I don’t see how someone not understanding GL first can do anything useful with it. Like, what would such people even use it for? If they need a complete solution just use a plugin that displays some rotatable 3D model. But I really don’t see the value of planning for the lowest common denominator in case of a highly specialized domain specific API.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com