alt Hacker NewsAnd the GPU API cycle of life and death continues!
I was an only-half-joking champion of ditching vertex attrib bindings when we were drafting WebGPU and WGSL, because it's a really nice simplification, but it was felt that would be too much of a departure from existing APIs. (Spending too many of our "Innovation Tokens" on something that would cause dev friction in the beginning)
In WGSL we tried (for a while?) to build language features as "sugar" when we could. You don't have to guess what order or scope a `for` loop uses when we just spec how it desugars into a simpler, more explicit (but more verbose) core form/dialect of the language.
That said, this powerpoint-driven-development flex knocks this back a whole seriousness and earnestness tier and a half: > My prototype API fits in one screen: 150 lines of code. The blog post is titled “No Graphics API”. That’s obviously an impossible goal today, but we got close enough. WebGPU has a smaller feature set and features a ~2700 line API (Emscripten C header).
Try to zoom out on the API and fit those *160* lines on one screen! My browser gives up at 30%, and I am still only seeing 127. This is just dishonesty, and we do not need more of this kind of puffery in the world.
And yeah, it's shorter because it is a toy PoC, even if one I enjoyed seeing someone else's take on it. Among other things, the author pretty dishonestly elides the number of lines the enums would take up. (A texture/data format enum on one line? That's one whole additional Pinocchio right there!)
I took WebGPU.webidl and did a quick pass through removing some of the biggest misses of this API (queries, timers, device loss, errors in general, shader introspection, feature detection) and some of the irrelevant parts (anything touching canvas, external textures), and immediately got it down to 241 declarations.
This kind of dishonest puffery holds back an otherwise interesting article.
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Who cares about dev friction in the beginning? That was a bad choice.
Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model, and instead find a leaner approach to do the same thing. Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines. Ditching vertex attrib bindings and going for programmable vertex fetching would have been nice.
WebGPU could have also introduced Cuda's simple launch model for graphics APIs. Instead of all that insane binding boilerplate, just provide the bindings as launch args to the draw call like draw(numTriangles, args), with args being something like draw(numTriangles, {uniformBuffer, positions, uvs, samplers}), depending on whatever the shaders expect.