This makes writing a compiler or writing an OS kernel look like child's play.
It manages memory, processes and security, it can run user-supplied arbitrary code. It has an API, not unlike system calls that allows programs to access the underlying hardware. It doesn't do thing like writing on the address bus directly, but it does have the equivalent of drivers that are proxies to the underlying OS services for display, audio, video, etc..., which it abstracts away. Like many OSes it comes with a compiler and a shell.
Sure, it doesn't access the hardware directly through the address and data buses, like one may think an OS should do, but now that we have stuff like hypervisors, even what are unquestionably true OSes like Windows and Linux may not access the hardware directly either.
I'm joking. Maybe. Probably. It seems like we've come full circle with MS-DOS and Windows 3 in the 90s.
- The Fundamental Theorem of Bloatware Engineering
Indeed. The modern web browser is the single most advanced, complex, and highly developed piece of software that 99% of people will ever interact with, and we treat it as a given. Having a highly performant fully sandboxed VM that runs on every system imaginable in billions of devices used by nearly every human on earth is the single greatest triumph of software engineering ever, perhaps only second to the Linux kernel.
Roughly 60% of earth's population used the internet in 2023. So not quite nearly every human.
3 out of 4, or 75%, seems like nearly ever human, I'd say (though it is a matter of opinion I guess.)
Much like the cliché "the internet is the sum of all human knowledge".
If you have deep specialist knowledge in a field that has existed for more than thirty years it can become quite obvious that the internet really in is nowhere near "the sum" of our knowledge.
And even the 60% is some hand wavy estimate about internet reach, about people using the internet frequently. More people use the internet than that, some transparently through some smartphone app or basic feature phone, which almost everybody has even in the poorest places in Africa.
Everybody knows avid users at 75+ or 10-, you haven't discovered something knew. But there are whole countries/areas/cultures where e.g. the majority of 75+ have no internet use, and no interest in getting any. You know, in the world, not in the US.
Perhaps you could in an MVP implementation, but in practice no, none of the serious implementations do that by default. First because native OpenGL drivers are generally a mess, so browsers actually implement WebGL on top of DirectX, Vulkan or Metal wherever they can, and even when those aren't available the browsers still parse, validate and reconstitute the GLSL rather than passing it straight through to OpenGL as a layer of insulation against driver bugs. Chrome and Firefox do have hidden feature flags which bypass that behavior and call the native GL implementation directly, but you probably shouldn't enable those unless you're really into ShaderToy and want it to compile faster.
Thank you for the tip!
ANGLE is the de-facto standard library that all of the big browsers use to implement WebGL on top of other graphics APIs, if you want to read up on it.
We do not typically call TeX a "compiler". We don't consider XSLT engines to be "compilers". dot(1) is not normally considered to be a "compiler". And so on.