Hacker News Reader

SDL people are working in creating some shader language in the form of SDL_gpu (not the old one), to launch in SDL3, so it could have some cross platform way to work with 3D graphics there for games. I have been looking at it closely for a little while.

View on HN

Is SDL_gpu meaningfully different from WebGPU? Looking at their goals they seem to be more or less the same, building an accessible lowest-common-denominator abstraction over DX12/Vulkan/Metal, except SDL_gpu is an early work in progress and WebGPU already has two good open implementations.

Not sure about WebGPU. Is it really good? Have you checked with some benchmarks?

From my experience, it's been disappointing. Big, complex to setup, not convinced about many tradeoffs.

WebGPU running on the web necessarily has overhead compared to native due to all the extra validation it has to do for security, but there's nothing stopping native implementations from offering unsafe escape hatches as extensions for those who want them.

And wgpu has been doing this for years. Things like descriptor indexing are not exposed to the web but used by Rust (mostly) engines on native.

https://wgpu.rs/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com