Comment by SuboptimalEng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SuboptimalEng | Hacker News Reader

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Wow! First of all, thank you for your amazing blog posts and tutorials! I wouldn't have been able to make it this far without them. Seriously, I was stuck for so long until a random Google search linked me to that WebGL ray-casting article you wrote. (I'd pin your comment if I could.)

The funny thing is that I was getting more confident about using JS + WebGL/WebGPU ecosystem for graphics programming after having read your posts. Very interesting to hear that you've come full circle back to Cpp + WebGL/WebGPU + WebAssembly. I'll look more closely to assess options as I head down this journey. Thank you for your tips and advice!

Edit: Perhaps you'd find my "What is WebGPU" video on YouTube interesting. I'd love to get it fact-checked by someone who's been doing WebGl/WebGPU way longer than most people! I only got into this field ~2 years ago.

Sure I'd be happy to check it out, my email's in my profile (or Github/website).

There are some tradeoffs w/ WebAssembly as well (not sharing the same memory as JS/TS is the biggest one) and debugging can be a bit tough as well though now there's a good VSCode plugin for it [0]. Another part of the reason I also moved back to C++ -> Wasm was for the performance improvement from Wasm vs. JS/TS, but the cross compilation to native/web was the main motivator.

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

It's interesting to hear that Cpp is faster even though there is an overhead of moving data from WASM <-> JS/TS. I'm not yet ready to "take the leap" to learn Cpp + Metal + XCode + WASM because those are some big hurdles to jump through (especially just in my free time), but you do raise some good points.

I'm certain you could turn this knowledge into a blog post and help many more engineers who are silently struggling through this path. Self-studying graphics programming is tough!

It should pop up first on YouTube if you search "What is WebGPU Suboptimal Engineer", but I'll link it here[0] in case anyone else wants to watch it. (No need for you to actually fact-check it. I didn't mean to put random work on your plate on a Sunday haha.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIur9NATg-I

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