The Future of wasi-gfx and wasi:webgpu

https://wasi-gfx.dev/blog/posts/future-of-wasi-gfx/

by mendyberger • 1 month ago

43 14 1 month ago

It is amazing to see what is happening with wasm/wasi lately and that is all grew out of asm.js.

asm.js, like JSON, is a strict subset of the JavaScript grammar that turned out to be very useful in a certain way. Obviously, a text encoding like asm.js wasn't an efficient way to distribute a bytecode, but it proved enough to make wasm the obvious next step.

pjmlp5• 1 month ago

Everyone keeps forgetting NaCL and PNaCL predates it, and asm.js only exists because Mozilla didn't want to adopt it.

flohofwoe5• 1 month ago

And this was the one time Mozilla was right ;)

flohofwoe5• 1 month ago

Makes sense to move the window system glue parts on a different 'track'.

IME the window system glue is the actually ugly and maintenance heavy part when writing a cross-platform 3D API wrapper. The various core 3D APIs (D3D, Metal, Vulkan, even GL) all map to the same hardware so it's quite trivial to get them to do the same thing.

But for the window system glue it gets ugly. Different platforms and window systems don't agree on how 3D rendered surfaces should be presented and how frame-pacing is supposed to work, there's a fundamental conflict between event-driven UI apps and frame-driven 'game-y' apps, the window system glue generally seems to get less attention than the core 3D APIs (maybe because it sits exactly between areas of responsibility), there are sometimes subtle behaviour changes between operating system updates (especially on macOS), and let's not even mention Wayland.

The result is that the code which sits between the window system and 3D rendering becomes an accumulation of experiments, hacks and workarounds, has a very high churn and in the end those 10% of the code base suck up 90% of the work :/

cyber_kinetist• 1 month ago

I thought SDL3 covers everything on that front though? Don't think we need to reinvent the wheel too much for window management.

flohofwoe5• 1 month ago

...and GLFW, winit, RayLib, SFML, sokol_app.h etc etc... ;)

It just offloads all the pain and hassle to the SDL maintainers. Also SDL is a pretty big beast (partly because it needs to accumulate a lot of hacks and workaround for buggy drivers and window systems). It would be nice when all those accumulated hacks wouldn't be needed in the first place.

For the idea of portable gfx applications in WASI it's also not really an option to base the window system glue standard on SDL (I guess though that SDL could be the base for one specific implementation of the WASI window system glue interface).

shevy-java• 1 month ago

I have finally realised that the year of true WebAssembly breakthrough will coincide with Desktop Linux of the year and GNU Hurd installed on every toaster. It will be a strange year ...

pjmlp5• 1 month ago

The Year of Desktop Linux already arrived, except not as originally expected.

It turned out to be The Year of Desktop Linux VMs/containers, on someone's else desktop OS.

The Future of wasi-gfx and wasi:webgpu

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