Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

webkit.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 650 posts

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#191

Post by jgord »

Now that Apple has all power and wealth, they arrogantly push an api nobody wants, resulting in man-centuries of wasted effort and frustration .. instead of listening to their users [ in this case developers ]

We have seen this before - fortunately no matter how much money they put behind this bad idea, the internet is larger than apple, and open standard apis and choice will eventually win.

I don't want an apple api, I don't want yet-another-kool-language-fad they will drop in the next marketing cycle, I want old style javascript to run fast and be standards compliant on mobile, including on iOS devices.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#192

Post by vlozko »

jsheard wrote: post #161
msie wrote: post #125

MS doesn't support Vulkan! Why are many people bashing Apple as the sole company not supporting it??? MS has abandoned OpenGL in support of D3D. Why have people forgotten this???

Microsoft doesn't need to support Vulkan, because Windows is flexible enough that GPU vendors can expose other APIs like OpenGL or Vulkan without Microsoft's permission. It's a very different situation to macOS, where Apple are the sole gatekeepers of the graphics stack and nothing can ever happen without their direct support.

Not every GPU vendor or all the cards of a vendor support Vulkan. Even new ones being sold today. The adoption is broad but not complete for Windows. I guess the argument can be made that vendors ought to support it but that would vastly expand the scope of any web API Vulkanization efforts.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#193

Post by shmerl »

angry-hacker wrote: post #173
hota_mazi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand your desire to have Vulkan on Apple platforms, but it's really a separate issue from the right target for WebGPU. No, it's not a separate issue. If Apple supported Vulcan, the simple act of proposing this new API as a standard would be laughed out of the room. We can only speculate why Apple won't support Vulcan but I'm going to go with "Prefer a solution they designed themselves over one designed by o…

While I agree with you, I doubt some random webkit engineer has any power saying what to support. Apple never listens to anyone, probably some higher exec wants better lock in and that they design the standards. Everyone else keep their mouths shut.

Then why should W3C accept the views of that higher execs as something useful for the Web? Let them remain Apple only.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#194

Post by boardwaalk »

brians wrote: post #165
ioquatix wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you are going to find is that there is a lot of frustration w.r.t. Apple not supporting Vulkan. One system for everything else and one system for Apple. > I think you are wrong on that. Vulkan is a low-level native API, not a JavaScript API for the web. Lots of design work needs to be done. Nothing you assert here is invalid. But, I think you've missed the main point, which is that people don't want an e…

Vulkan isn't designed for adversarial input. The web language has to be. That alone is likely to require a ground-up redesign.

But OpenGL wasn't either. I'd like to hear concrete examples of how it couldn't be made workable. There are already validation layers that do a pretty good job of checking for bad usage.

Especially since things like NaCl exist(ed) which are inarguably lower level and still safe.

I think it's folly to create a whole new API before evaluating the option of using Vulkan.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#195

Post by shmerl »

om2 wrote: post #127
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say they're totally orthogonal. Presumably you understand that if Apple supported Vulkan natively, then "WebVulkan" would be the obvious choice for a web API (just as it was with OpenGL/WebGL).

I don't think browsers will choose to pipe this through Vulkan drivers on Windows (since they are all unofficial and in general don't have as complete coverage) and I don't think they'd choose to use unofficial Vulkan drivers for Apple platforms either, even if they existed. Also, if you compare the sample code in the post with a sample of Vulkan code, I think it will be clear that a literal "WebVulkan" is a road bes…

So who stops Apple (and MS for that matter) from making it official? If it's about collaboration, let them grow up and stop their petty lock-in games. And if not, I don't think anyone should accept proposals coming from them for such things.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#196

Post by nkkollaw »

pygy_ wrote: post #70
JoshTriplett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I expect Vulkan was designed with the expectation of process-level isolation being the end-all of security concerns. That's not sufficient for single-process, multi-tab browsers. Chrome has process isolation, and Firefox is developing process isolation right now. I don't think it makes sense for a new technology stack to go out of its way to support single-process multi-tab browsers.

But even in chrome, several tabs can share the same process, which means that information can be leaked, cross-tab.

Really? I thought each tab had its own process.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#197

Post by saurik »

paulddraper wrote: post #156
saurik wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple definitely keeps up with core JavaScript and CSS support, but essentially anywhere the web undermines their attempt to maintain control over a protocol, file format, or API--or for anything that makes the browser fundamentally more powerful (which undermines their attempt to get developers to focus on native applications, and which stuff like ES6 is fundamentally not an example)--they invest only a token amount…

Have you examples?

Service Workers, Pointer Events, Web Notifications, WebRTC... I could probably go on, but these are the ones everyone generally has at the top of their heads and which I can just rattle off without thinking about it much (and which have already been mentioned by other people on this very threads, and so absolutely should not require listing :/). The story of IndexedDB vs WebSQL (with Safari developers apparently being extreme zealots for the latter and essentially refusing to implement the former for years) is another great example. I recommend doing some basic searches using Google, as there is tons of great commentary on how Safari is "the new IE6" or is simply holding back the web.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#198

Post by pcwalton »

vvanders wrote: post #7

Anything that's not based on the Vulkan spec is just a land-grab by Apple to push their own technologies. As someone who spends a lot of time in that space I don't really see what this is solving, WebGL is good enough and anyone serious about performance/compute are going to drop down to native anyway.

> As someone who spends a lot of time in that space I don't really see what this is solving, WebGL is good enough and anyone serious about performance/compute are going to drop down to native anyway.

As someone who also spends a lot of time in the GPU space, I really want something newer than WebGL. WebGL is not good enough.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#199

Post by Rusky »

ioquatix wrote: post #105
om2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are wrong on that. Vulkan is a low-level native API, not a JavaScript API for the web. Lots of design work needs to be done. In addition, even on platforms where there are unofficial Vulkan drivers (such as Windows), it's likely the natively available API will still have more complete support and better performance. So either way, we need a cross-platform graphics API. Let's focus this discussion on impro…

I think what you are going to find is that there is a lot of frustration w.r.t. Apple not supporting Vulkan. One system for everything else and one system for Apple. > I think you are wrong on that. Vulkan is a low-level native API, not a JavaScript API for the web. Lots of design work needs to be done. Nothing you assert here is invalid. But, I think you've missed the main point, which is that people don't want an e…

> Actually that's not correct. Vulkan was explicitly designed to be an efficient and high-performance API. As it stands, even as a newborn API, it's the BEST available for 3D rendering on all platforms that support it, unofficial or not.

Just because it was designed to be high-performance doesn't mean it automatically wins on platform support and implementation quality. Direct3D 12 is at the same level as Vulkan, and I see no reason for the trend of D3D being higher quality than GL to end with Vulkan.

Re: Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API

#200

Post by microcolonel »

NickGerleman wrote: post #9

"The major platform technologies in this space are Direct3D 12 from Microsoft, Metal from Apple, and Vulkan from the Khronos Group. While these technologies have similar design concepts, unfortunately none are available across all platforms." So Apple, the only company not supporting Vulkan on their platforms, is complaining that there isn't a cross-platform solution?

I've submitted this as the first GitHub issue regarding the charter.

https://github.com/gpuweb/admin/issues/1

Post reply on HN