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Comment by arriu | Hacker News Reader

Having done both web and gl ux for a living, I think you might be overestimating the complexity of a gl implementation and underestimating the complexity of meeting the same specs using a web implementation.

While not quite the same thing, if you have the time, dip your toes into some immediate mode UI, for example imgui. It is enjoyable not a grind.

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Oh yeah, sure my friend. You're going to implement

  * text entry (right to left as well as left to right)
  * file browser
  * treeviews that scale to 50k nodes or 10x that
  * menus

in GL in a month. Not believable.

Never did they ever say that would implement the UI of Blender (I assume that's what you were referring to) using OpenGL. I think what they meant was that implementing just a UI in OpenGL isn't as hard as the other guy thought

Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole html/css stuff with just webgpu in a canvas? I have been playing a bit around with wgpu in rust and I can compile the same project either as a native binary or a .js that just renders to the browser. It seems to work pretty cool. Photoshop seems to be runable in the browser now, and I've seen a lot of other cool stuff, but things like fluid simulations seem to still be very laggy.

Rendering everything into a canvas will realistically mean total lack of accessibility features. Also you won't be able to use the DOM inspector. I don't think that would be an improvement at all. If one could work with the DOM via Wasm (plus source maps so you can still use the debugger) it might be something.

> webgpu in a canvas

Internally that's what Chrome/Firefox are, they render much of html/css on the GPU using OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/Metal.

> Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole html/css stuff with just

No, you also need the DOM to enable frameworks like React which are used by a large number of sites.

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