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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

How many game engines run on top of SVG?

How many games target SVG as their graphics pipeline?

How many applications, for that matter?

The comparison to PDF was better than you probably realize. PDF is Turing complete, and there have been ray-tracers implemented in it.

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Not wanting to disregard your pint, but there are definitely applications in SVG. The user interface for the most famous kitchen “robot” (Thermomix) is done entirely in SVG, and they (through open source consultants Igalia) are one of the most important contributors to SVG and Canvas functionality in WebKit.

https://blogs.igalia.com/nzimmermann/posts/2021-10-29-layer-...

> Not wanting to disregard your pint

Please leave my drink alone. :-(

I think you're confusing PDF with PostScript. The whole point of PDF was to remove the Turing completeness from PostScript.

PostScript ray tracer:

https://gist.github.com/grkvlt/2651230

Ahhah, I sit corrected! Thank you.

> Don't send this one to a printer. It will take too long

Damn, and here I was going to send it to my LaserWriter IINT!

Oh the comparison to PDF was perfect. PDF and Metal have the same recent ancestry with postscript.

What ugly prejudices so many people on this thread seem to have. And how trivial and nonsensical. All I said was she should not have omitted svg in her history of graphics apis since she's writing an article about browser graphics. To deny that svg is a part of that, or that people don't program to it... well, I was going to write "ridiculous" but the xkcd about people who don't know things comes to mind...is it possible you just don't know that so many people make things with SVG? In any event, it seems I've touched a nerve that I didn't want to, and I find it ugly, and this is my free time, so I'm leaving the convo.

Peace.

> ...article about browser graphics

Despite the name, WebGPU isn't limited to browsers, I think the article sort-of implies that without explicitly pointing it out (until late into the article).

Instead WebGPU has a good chance to become the 'missing link' standard cross-platform 3D API that sits above D3D12, Metal and Vulkan and at the same time is relatively straightforward to use for mere mortals.

> it seems I've touched a nerve that I didn't want to, and I find it ugly

Well, yes, but you can see how your original comment may have been read as dismissive of other people's work?

Not only that, his comments are factually incorrect, while glibly dismissing a well written factually correct article as untrustworthy, based on his incorrect assumption that his incorrect facts imply her true facts are false. "So one should take it with a grain of salt." Sheez. How rude.

> All I said was she should have not omitted SVG in her history of graphics APIs since she’s writing an article about browser graphics. To deny that SVG is a part of that

You are continuing to double down on a straw man, which is why you’re getting all the push-back. The ugliness is ugliness you’ve single-handedly created because this is not an article about the history of browser graphics. It would have included SVG if that were the case, but it’s not, and you’re making assertions that aren’t warranted or justified here. This was an article about GPU APIs. Canvas was only mentioned briefly off-hand in passing twice, and the history of Canvas was not discussed at all, nor was the history of browser development. Nobody denied that SVG is part of anything, you are projecting your off-topic wishes onto a discussion where SVG simply does not belong, it’s tangential and not relevant to the article. It’s not relevant here how many people make things with SVG.

SVG is great. I wish development for SVG2 hadn’t stalled out, I would like to see SVG2 become broadly supported, there are some new options for dynamic scaling I’ve wanted to use for ten years. That said, this is a completely separate topic from the article & thread. You could get your SVG fix by submitting an article to HN that’s actually discussing SVG rather than trying to hijack the comment thread on an article about GPUs.

She omitted it because it's not an API, it's a file format. Even if you want to be lax about what you call an API, svg was never a competitor in this space. She also left out canvas, directdraw, direct2d, gdi, etc, because they're just not relevant to any of this.

In what sense is Metal descendent from PostScript? The comparison is anything but perfect: they're practically polar opposites.

Metal isn't a text based programming language like PostScript, and it has a completely different graphics model.

PostScript isn't pixel oriented, or 3d oriented, and Metal doesn't have a stencil/paint graphics model or text rendering.

They're totally different things, by totally different people and organizations.

Metal uses SPIR-V binary byte code, which is nothing like PostScript, a stack based high level polymorphic cross between Lisp or Forth, and a descendent of Interpres, JaM, and Design System.

As programming languages go, and as imaging models go, PostScript and Metal are at completely different ends of the spectrum.

SVG, like PDF, is the PostScript stencil/paint imaging mode, without the Turing complete programming language, but expressed as XML, with some CSS thrown in. And some implementation of SVG even let you define event handlers in JavaScript, but Metal sure doesn't let you do that. And to top it off, SVG is "object oriented" (i.e. a DOM) while Metal is "immediate mode" (i.e. an API). They couldn't be more different.

Since your facts are wrong, and you're throwing around insults like "ugly prejudices" and "trivial and nonsensical" and "ridiculous" and "people who don't know things" and "I've touched a nerve" and "I find it ugly", then it's a good thing that you're "leaving the convo", because you haven't contributed anything but misinformation and insults.