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1. Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 01:14:31 UTC Bernie

   When will WebGPU get enabled by major browsers?

   It's been under development for... 5 years now? Chromium and Firefox carry a development preview behind a flag.
   https://caniuse.com/webgpu

   • wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 13:13:50 UTC wizzwizz4

     in reply to

     @codewiz They're still making changes to WGSL's syntax. I expect it'll be a while more before it's ready.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 13:21:52 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • wizzwizz4

     @wizzwizz4 Ohh... 😔

     But I guess it's for the better... hopefully this will be *the* shading language that works across all GPU vendors and operating systems.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 14:24:05 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • wizzwizz4

     @wizzwizz4 GLSL looked a lot like C with a nice syntax for vector and matrix operations.
     WGSL is looking more and more like Rust with less syntactic noise.

     Too bad statements such as switch and if don't return values like in Rust. I think the typical code that goes into shaders would benefit from a slightly more functional style. And I say "slightly" because it can be abused to write every function as one big expression.

   • wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 14:24:06 UTC wizzwizz4

     in reply to

     @codewiz I do prefer the new WGSL syntax. It's got @attribute instead of [[attribute]] syntax.

   • wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 21-Aug-2022 14:29:21 UTC wizzwizz4

     in reply to

     @codewiz WGSL is not a very high-level language, and it's supposed to be approachable. "Everything is an expression" is a nice language feature, but it's not an obvious one for a C or English speaker.

     WGSL isn't particularly better than GLSL, imo, except in its explicitness. GLSL has a load of hidden default state; not being an OpenGL expert, I don't know what the defaults are or how to change the options. But with WGSL, I can read a shader and understand it, and I've got search terms if not.