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A comment on SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2. Parent comment

Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by pjmlp on Sunday February 26, 2023 @02:50AM (#34943850)
It was also supposed to support GL ES compute shaders, developed by Intel, which Google refused to implement in name of WebGPU compute.

So here we are without WebGPU being stable and without WebGL compute.

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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by modeless on Sunday February 26, 2023 @10:50AM (#34946414)
Apple refused to implement GL compute shaders. Without that, Intel's code didn't work on macOS.
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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by pjmlp on Sunday February 26, 2023 @11:46AM (#34946932)
It isn't as if WebGL relies on GL on Windows.

Chrome could have done it on top of Metal.

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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by modeless on Sunday February 26, 2023 @01:04PM (#34947665)
Yes, Chrome could have rewritten the entire WebGL implementation to run on Metal. Maybe. Without support from Apple I'm not certain that WebGL 2 could have been fully implemented in a 100% compatible way over desktop Metal at the time. But it's not as though Google rejected a working implementation for no good reason.
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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by pjmlp on Sunday February 26, 2023 @04:17PM (#34949560)
And now WebGL 2.0 on Safari is actually implemented on top of Metal, with help of Chrome team.

"At the time" was 2021.

Politics.

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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by modeless on Sunday February 26, 2023 @05:01PM (#34949989)
"At the time" was 2019 actually. Back then it wasn't even clear if Apple would ever implement WebGL 2 at all.
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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by pjmlp on Monday February 27, 2023 @02:08AM (#34953871)
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113199...

-- Sep 24, 2020,

https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0-compute/

-- Last update, regarding deprecation, 31 March 2021

Hence 2021.

Same reasoning could be applied to Microsoft and Sony Playstation browsers, where neither of them support GL.

Fact is that after all these years, WebGPU still isn't here as stable version that one can rely on, and even then it is only a MVP with an incompatible shader language.

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Re:SwissGL: Swiss Army Knife for WebGL2 by modeless on Monday February 27, 2023 @12:05PM (#34958915)
The code wasn't removed immediately when the decision was made so that people could continue prototyping compute shaders before WebGPU was available to test on. Game console browsers are completely irrelevant as their market share is so miniscule it's not even visible on most tracking sites.
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