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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

It is called middleware, no need to wait for WebGPU outside of the browser, with all the constraints of an API design targeted to browser sandboxes.

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None of those middlewares have a spec and none of them offer the compatibility guarantees that WebGPU provides.

Even webgl don't give any gurentee about your code will run well on any devices though. It only gurentee that it will run, but it can have 10x performance difference on different platform depends on how you wrote the shaders.

As anyone used to Khronos APIs is aware, that is of little value without actual Conformance Tests Suites, and even then there are plently of forgotten guarantees when using consumer hardware with all the usual OEM quality practices.

Good then that even WebGL mostly doesn't run on Khronos APIs ;) (only on Linux, although I don't know whether ANGLE is now actually using a Vulkan backend on Linux - which of course is also a Khronos API though).

Both WebGL2 and WebGPU are probably the most 'watertight' specced and tested 3D API ever built, and especially WebGPU has gone to great lengths to eliminate UB present in native APIs (even at the cost of usability).

And yet it is lots of fun to debug on Android.

We only need to open chrome://gpu and see how many workarounds are implementated.

Those that happen to own a device where workarounds are yet to be implemented, have quite interesting experiences, depending on the root cause.

As this is an increasing list across Chrome releases.

Lets see how it works out there with Firefox and Safari, the later still not fully WebGL 2.0 compliant.

So much for the watertightness.

The Android OS and the entire Android ecosystem being a huge pile of excrement isn't really surprising though. But it's 'too big to ignore' unfortunately, at least for browser APIs.

wgpu can run the WebGPU Conformance Test Suite for validation against the WebGPU specification. Was there something else you'd like to see?

I think the parent is implying there are 1001 soc out there with some form of embedded gpu that probably have issues actually implementing webgpu. Like those in millions of Chinese tablets. Are they likely targets? Probably not now but in 5 years? Mainstream desktop hardware? No problem.

they just have to implement Vulkan, enough for it to run Dawn or wgpu

See Android for how much fun it is to debug OpenGL ES and Vulkan issues.

Not really, as mentioned, middleware does the job with much better developer tooling.

What I really would like to see is browser vendors finally providing WebGL and WebGPU debugging tools.

I think a decade has been more than enough for that.

Then again, no one is paying for browsers, so I guess I should not complain.

Can you point me to some good middleware then? I haven't been able to find any.

GDC Vault programming track has plenty of examples.

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