Lacks power. Existing solutions are SPIR-V and PTX.

I know. I mean something that's simple and has this old school flavor. Like say if GPUs were the standard in the 80s.

This would be fascinating to see, I have no idea how you'd even start.

There was a video I saw a couple of years back that was showcasing a cellular programming model, where each cell in a two dimensional grid performed an operation on values received from its neighbours. Values would move into one side of a cell and out the other every tick, something like Orca (by 100 rabbits), so the whole thing could be parallelised on the cell level very easily.

You need a really simple set of assembly instructions for a vm that is based on gpu architecture.

Then make all the old school IO apis and rendering engine around it similar to pico 8 or bedrock.

The UI is a bit Similar to shader toy I guess.