alt Hacker NewsMan, 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.
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My biggest issues with WebGPU are, yet another shading language, and after 15 years, browser developers don't care one second for debugging tools.
It is either pixel debugging, or trying to replicate in native code for proper tooling.
My understanding is that pipelines in Vulkan still matter if you target certain GPUs though.
>Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model
WebGPU doesn't talk to the GPU directly. It requires Vulkan/D3D/Metal underneath to actually implement itself.
>Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines.
Vulkan did no such thing. As of today (Vulkan 1.4) they added VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering to core and added the VK_EXT_shader_object extension, which are not required to be supported and must be queried for before using. The former gets rid of render pass objects and framebuffer objects in favor of vkCmdBeginRendering(), and WebGPU already abstracts those two away so you don't see or deal with them. The latter gets rid of monolithic pipeline objects.
Many mobile GPUs still do not support VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering or VK_EXT_shader_object. Even my very own Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra[1] doesn't support shaderObject.
Vulkan did not get rid of pipeline objects, they added extensions for modern desktop GPUs that didn't need them. Even modern mobile GPUs still need them, and WebGPU isn't going to fragment their API to wall off mobile users.
[1] https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/displayreport.php?id=44583