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That's fair, but if you're looking at say, coding up many many lines of Vulkan boilerplate for a new project, it does kinda make sense to look into WebGPU

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Looking into middleware is a much more sane option.

WebGPU's native libraries are essentially middleware to abstract over the common subset of Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal.

That is a wrapper library, middleware means more richer tooling and development experience.

At very minimum something like Ogre3d or Open Inventor.

...which is then often too opinionated and bloated for specific use cases. E.g. nobody in their right mind would use Unity for a simple 3D viewer application.

You would be surprised.

No one outside AAA studios cares about Vulkan, and Khronos had to come up with ANARI to try to move visualization companies out of OpenGL/DirectX into Vulkan.

Nobody in their right mind would use 'raw' Vulkan either for a simple 3D viewer. But that's exactly why thin wrapper libraries are important.

A simple 3d viewer should just use WebGL. Low level APIs are targeted at large game engine developers.

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