kvark

WGSL could be good for Khronos. It’s a modern language with an actual specification. It’s gaining users every day.

Having a standard CLI is definitely helpful. But does it have to be so hard to use? At what point would we acknowledge that we are being hostage by some random ideas put into ancient software, which just happened to survive?

I don't think calling for a stop of experimentation is the way. Nobody is going to take away your vi and bash any time soon.

Time will tell if this API is usable. In particular, the way resource synchronization works, and object renaming. Time will tell if it will perform better than WebGPU or other abstractions. Time will tell if it remains small in the presence of driver bugs that need working around…

I’m also sceptical about their new bytecode for a shading language. Parsing shaders at runtime was not a concern with WebGPU - it’s very fast. Even producing native shaders is fast [1]. It’s the pipeline creation that’s slow, and this bytecode wouldn’t help here.

[1] http://kvark.github.io/naga/shader/2022/02/17/shader-transla...

This rubs me the wrong way. Resource renaming is a high level concept, which was one of the features of OpenGL that all the modern APIs have successfully dropped. A modern low level GPU API should not do that.

Personally, it’s because they are not open source and not as fast.

Moving fast works well if you don’t know exactly what you’d be doing tomorrow. It’s an effective strategy of experimentation, regardless of VC money supporting it.

It was useful during WebGPU development [1] given that some topics were very nuanced in debate.

[1] https://github.com/kvark/webgpu-debate

I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back. If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.

It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use. In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.

Windows builds are out there. You can build it yourself as well. They haven’t matured as much as Linux ones yet. But your requirement of portability is definitely fulfilled.

I don’t think there is a hard requirement in the code. It may work well on lavapipe (software Vulkan).

Back when I worked on WebGPU in Firefox, GPU debugging was pretty straightforward. You’d use a setting that enables API traces of WebGPU, give it a path, and it would produce a trace. Then you’d replay it in a standalone application that is easily ran from NSight/RenderDoc/PIX/whatever. Moreover, you could replay it on a different platform with a different API! It was a breeze. I bet it still works.

http://kvark.github.io/wgpu/debug/test/ron/2020/07/18/wgpu-a...

I feel quite aligned on this. I would push further and say that I need a Markdown-based Google Wave reincarnation!

But if you want collaborative markdown in general, there are solutions like Hack.md

A markdown document (e.g. from Obsidian) can be hosted as easily.

Oh don’t tell me MacOS treats me as the true owner. Would you want to switch to Safari as the default browser?. Would you enable iCloud sync, your disk is low. Would you update tonight or tomorrow? Can be annoying just as Windows.

My US driving test didn’t even include a highway drive. It does feel like the ability to drive is treated as a right here. It’s only a privilege from the license cost point of view.

We did port Servo’s WebRender to Firefox and shipped it everywhere. The only caveat is that it took multiple years of upgrades, fixes, and rewriting it.

I’m trying to get to a point of convergence with 3 different contributors hacking on it right now, and make it a PR. There is also a new “windows-port” channel on Discord. Finally, we are waiting for Zed team to confirm if they are interested to have Windows port in tree at this point.

As a side note, Linux is going pretty strong!

Windows support is happening locally on individuals machines. We’ll start upstreaming things up.

You can already build and run it in Linux, even type things in and have dialogs! Linux and Windows are coming.

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/

Linux support is actively developed. The working branch got merged earlier today: it compiles and runs, but a lot of basic stuff is missing yet.

I worked at Mozilla for 5 years. It’s a wonderful company with kind and motivated people. But your concerns are totally valid, unfortunately…

How are you planning to tackle the GPU API differences?

I’m looking forward to solutions with Linux that are vertically integrated. I know System76 is moving in this direction, but Apple will remain the king in this area in the near future. Without vertical integration it’s a mess, no party wants to control the end to end experience and take responsibility.

Exciting tech, looking forward to see it running on wgpu! There is an issue about WebGPU although I don’t notice references to the native version of it.

https://github.com/huggingface/candle/issues/344

The platforms war continues. I’m looking forward to see the native platform shrinking, only because it will mostly hurt Microsoft.

http://kvark.github.io/web/platform/2020/09/30/platform-wars...

A bit unfortunate that Google’s Dawn missed the train for developing new projects in Rust, by just a few years. Might have been an interesting collaboration with Mozilla on the WebGPU implementation.

Interesting. So bevy_rapier isn’t liked as much because it doesn’t lay over Bevy ECS nicely. Does everything need to integrate with ECS? How does it help a physics engine, specifically?

I wish we had a TL;DR easily. Those lengthy scientific/history articles are doing a good job at killing any excitement about the core ideas.