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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chrome could have done it on top of Metal.