Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

Re:Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle by kbenson on Thursday March 12, 2015 @06:57PM (#9194552)

To be fair, I think the takeaway isn't don't make/use abstraction layers, but don't make a one-size-fits-all abstraction and then hide the lower level stuff. A targeted abstraction that correctly supports the domain you are in is still a good thing. That's what the engine developers end up being here, an abstraction on top of this low level API that gives many devs exactly what they want.

Edit: To be clear, I don't think writing a web rendering engine meant to do the same think as the browser on top of WebGL will be faster in any respect, as really the HTML and CSS are just inputs fed into super optimized low level rendering engines. I don't see how JS could compete in that domain.

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Re:Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle by Rusky on Thursday March 12, 2015 @09:22PM (#9195175)

Reminds me of MIT's Exokernel- make the lower level interfaces as low-level as possible (while still providing security) and let user-level libraries provide various abstractions suited to different use cases.

No file systems, no network protocols, no processes; just a very thin layer that lets userspace implement those if/how it wants to.

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Re:Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle by lmm on Friday March 13, 2015 @07:58AM (#9196685)

Parts of CSS3 are already faster to implement "by hand" in javascript rather than using the browser's "native" implementation.

HTML/CSS was designed for requirements that don't apply to many modern websites. I would not be surprised if it were possible to implement a rendering engine that performed better for relevant use cases, e.g. perhaps assuming a grid as a first-class part of the layout.

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