It's apple that didn't want SPIRV and insisted on something else, preferably text based. Doesn't matter who is doing that something else now, it's done because of Apple... Which I'm not entirely a fan of because I don't think apple's history in WebGL, OpenGL and graphics makes them deserve the leverage they're getting.

I surely hope not the later, let Apple pay performance price for being the root of the problem.

It's not even clear if Chrome or Firefox will accept SPIR-V binary as an extension at this point.

Anyway, conversion to and from SPIR-V is supposed to be straightforward and light. Our (speaking for gfx-rs community) Rust-based shader infrastructure will handle that , and the converter should be easily compilable to wasm (when it's ready).

Anyway x2, most of the time in the whole picture of creating pipelines will be spent in the driver, so whatever parsing performance difference WGSL brings to the table, be it 5% or 10%, doesn't matter, you aren't going to see that in benchmarks because of that other stuff that's going on when you are creating a pipeline.

I hope Mozilla and Google won't cave that way to this Apple's idiotic behavior.