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WebGPU and WSL in Safari

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Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#71

Post by modeless »

dman wrote: post #66
pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

I miss the years where inspite of all its flaws, OpenGL was a non deprecated option on all the platforms. I know it left performance on the table, I know the drivers for some vendors were iffy and I know reasoning about performance across different vendors / drivers / platforms was difficult - but it worked most of the time and allowed me to have a mostly unified codebase everywhere.

You can still kind of have that experience by using ANGLE[1] as your OpenGL implementation. It lets you use the same dialect of OpenGL ES on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android, with consistent behavior across platforms.

ANGLE is the base of the WebGL implementation in Chrome. For WebGPU, we (Google) are working on a new native library called Dawn[2] that will fill the same role that ANGLE does for WebGL. I'm personally hopeful that Dawn itself can eventually be useful as a cross platform graphics abstraction for native apps as well as web apps. There's also Mozilla's gfx-rs[3] in the same space.

[1] https://github.com/google/angle

[2] https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn

[3] https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#72

Post by Jasper_ »

banachtarski wrote: post #64
pizlonator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WSL specification is a single document that tells you how the language executed and how it ensures security. SPIR-V simply does not have this. I don’t get your argument here. It’s really funny to say that we had to have dominator analysis patiently explained to them. I don’t have a clue what you are talking about there. In one meeting I remember having to explain dominator analysis to SPIR-V folks. (I am both a m…

What I don't understand about this logic is why you don't opt to augment SPIR-V with the aspects required as opposed to branching off on an entirely different standard. I'm sure there are politics I'm not privy to, but here I am watching 48 processors pegged on compiling shaders and I really don't care to deal with another instruction set.

Google has a well-defined SPIR-V execution environment they have been championing: https://github.com/gpuweb/spirv-execution-env/blob/master/ex...

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#73

Post by kangz »

om2 wrote: post #59
pcwalton wrote: post #55

As a cross-platform graphics developer who is currently knee-deep in papering over platform incompatibilities, what I mostly care about at this point is compatibility . I don't care about shader size or compilation time, as long as both are reasonable. I do care about having yet another shading language to cross-compile to. Please, everyone, just use something that already exists. It is frustrating how the big player…

The only thing that already exists that is provably web-safe is the WebGL dialect of GLSL (which no one seems to like). WebSPIR-V would be based on SPIR-V but in many ways has to be a new thing as well. Edit: I originally said "WebGPU dialect of GLSL" which is not a thing. I meant "WebGL dialect of GLSL", which is a thing and which works ok in practice.

There is no WebGPU dialect of GLSL, only a SPIR-V execution environment for WebGPU. Lnaguages in themselves aren't "safe" or "unsafe", their implementations are.

Also please stop trying to influence a technical debate in a standardization group by putting blog posts on top of Hacker News.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#74

Post by saamyjoon »

kangz wrote: post #73
om2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that already exists that is provably web-safe is the WebGL dialect of GLSL (which no one seems to like). WebSPIR-V would be based on SPIR-V but in many ways has to be a new thing as well. Edit: I originally said "WebGPU dialect of GLSL" which is not a thing. I meant "WebGL dialect of GLSL", which is a thing and which works ok in practice.

There is no WebGPU dialect of GLSL, only a SPIR-V execution environment for WebGPU. Lnaguages in themselves aren't "safe" or "unsafe", their implementations are. Also please stop trying to influence a technical debate in a standardization group by putting blog posts on top of Hacker News.

You're absolutely wrong here. A language must specify its semantics. Those semantics describe the safety properties of that language.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#75

Post by markdog12 »

wffurr wrote: post #58

In the meantime, they never added support for WebGL2 and MSAA on Framebuffer Objects. Blargh.

https://twitter.com/gfxprogrammer/status/1171553288681996288

"We're collaborating with Dean and the WebKit team to use ANGLE for WebGL's backend in WebKit, which will allow an easy upgrade to WebGL 2.0 on all platforms. Follow https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198948 for updates on the work."

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#76

Post by kangz »

om2 wrote: post #57
Jasper_ wrote: post #14

Web Shading Language is a non-starter. I looked quite closely at the specification. Apple has argued in the WebGPU WG that SPIR-V is not defined enough, semantically, to be meaningful, but WSL is even worse. Sometimes, it's even explained in terms of SPIR-V, like in the case of discard, where it was hastily explained in terms of SPIR-V's OpKill after we identified it was completely missing. Apple has blocked any poss…

You may not like it but it's pretty clear that WSL is at least a starter. It has a spec, a test suite, and an implementation (which fully implements safety). And the implementation is pretty fast, and should at least dispel WSL vs SPIR-V performance concerns. This is arguably ahead of the proposed web dialect of SPIR-V (which needs to subset the language, add validation steps, and insert safety checks).

The SPIR-V for WebGPU has the subsetting of the language at [1], validation is fully implemented in spirv-val and as are the safety checks in spirv-opt.

SPIR-V is also proven to compile to all the target APIs for WebGPU, while WSL only has a MSL transpiler right now.

[1] https://github.com/gpuweb/spirv-execution-env/blob/master/ex...

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#77

Post by om2 »

kangz wrote: post #73
om2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that already exists that is provably web-safe is the WebGL dialect of GLSL (which no one seems to like). WebSPIR-V would be based on SPIR-V but in many ways has to be a new thing as well. Edit: I originally said "WebGPU dialect of GLSL" which is not a thing. I meant "WebGL dialect of GLSL", which is a thing and which works ok in practice.

There is no WebGPU dialect of GLSL, only a SPIR-V execution environment for WebGPU. Lnaguages in themselves aren't "safe" or "unsafe", their implementations are. Also please stop trying to influence a technical debate in a standardization group by putting blog posts on top of Hacker News.

Sorry, I meant WebGL, simply mistyped.

As far as posting blog posts, we think this is just as fair as the Chrome team's communication about their own WebGPU implementation, which included a public demo and sessions at Google I/O which were widely reported.

As for the post getting upvoted to the top of Hacker News, that's the community's choice, not ours. The initial poster wasn't even an Apple person (afaik). If you are insinuating some kind of vote manipulation then that is inaccurate.

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#78

Post by om2 »

pcwalton wrote: post #61
om2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that already exists that is provably web-safe is the WebGL dialect of GLSL (which no one seems to like). WebSPIR-V would be based on SPIR-V but in many ways has to be a new thing as well. Edit: I originally said "WebGPU dialect of GLSL" which is not a thing. I meant "WebGL dialect of GLSL", which is a thing and which works ok in practice.

I don't see any way in which it won't be way more work to migrate to this proposed WSL than to get my existing SPIR-V tooling working with Web SPIR-V.

The actual functionality exposed is close enough that cross-compiling is a solvable problem. But fair point.

(On the flip side, having two syntactically very similar but actually different things can be dangerous, as it may lead devs to think some tooling works when it actually doesn't.)

Re: WebGPU and WSL in Safari

#79

Post by om2 »

Jasper_ wrote: post #72
banachtarski wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand about this logic is why you don't opt to augment SPIR-V with the aspects required as opposed to branching off on an entirely different standard. I'm sure there are politics I'm not privy to, but here I am watching 48 processors pegged on compiling shaders and I really don't care to deal with another instruction set.

Google has a well-defined SPIR-V execution environment they have been championing: https://github.com/gpuweb/spirv-execution-env/blob/master/ex...

Is there a test suite?
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