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Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by mike_hearn on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:29AM (#35466506)
Yeah, but that's because performance always takes priority. The Vulkan/DX12/Metal APIs are lower level and much more tedious than OpenGL and shader based OpenGL was itself a step backwards in usability from the fixed function pipeline (when doing equivalent tasks). So the trend has been towards more generality and performance at the cost of usability for a long time in graphics APIs. Prefixing it with "Web" won't change that. I'm not saying that's a bad trend - the vendors take the perspective that people who need usability are using game engines anyway so "easy but low level" like classic GL is a need whose time has passed. There's probably a lot of truth to that view.
Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU by tormeh on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:52AM (#35466655)
Which is fine, IMO, as long as there are user-friendly abstractions on top of those foundations. I'd "just" like to write high-level code that runs on GPUs without having to worry about vendor/OS differences (yay, WebGPU) or writing boilerplate (nay, WebGPU). Currently it's all a bit too annoying for normal programmers to bother with. Every month there's a new programming language for CPUs that intends to make programming easier. I'd like this state of things, but for GPUs.