131–140 of 211 posts
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This is usually done with shaders and a circle of buffers which maintain state.
Total graphics / shaders / GPU noob here. Does that mean you'll essentially get free visualisations (albeit non-sensical ones) as a byproduct of your computations?
Surely you could visualize it but not as a side effect.
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Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web. It's nowadays also a cross-platform insta-deployment GUI application runtime environment with mostly bad native OS integration and performance characteristics (both ~improving, there's even native filesystem access now). In any case it's Good Enough (C), so it sticks.
> Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web. Free yourself from the notion that a web browser should do anything more than browsing the web. native applications have existed for decades, no reason to bloat the scope of a browser.
Regarding all the arguments about ever-increasing browser complexity and the resulting inefficiency: Why is nobody asking the reverse question: How to make operating systems more like browsers?? From the end user's PoV (consider someone who isn't computer savvy) what are the actual objective differences in usability, between the OS and browser? -- • OS: Apps have their own windows and menu bars. • Browser: Multiple a…
Question for discussion: when have we reached the point where the Browser Feature-creep is too much and we say "okay, a browser probably doesn't need this"? Because after seeing WebUSB and WebGPU I think my personal limit has been reached.
I agree there have been some questionable 'advancements' in the web spec recently (web workers as a solution to multithreading, for example, were hilariously inadequate for quite a while), but as far as I can tell WGPU is a solid effort to unlock browsers as an actually interactive platform, instead of the fairly static image/text display devices they are today.
Maybe our visions of what browsers could or 'should' be are different
How do I render text with GPU? Do I render text on texture with CPU and then send that texture to GPU? Do I vectorize it and draw millions of tiny triangles to approximate those vectors? It's interesting for me to explore WebGPU as a canvas for app development, but it's not obvious to me how to draw text and text is everywhere.
Most web games use the dom as a layer over top of the 3D canvas and then use 3D to 2D projections to align the elements. This allows you to use regular HTML and CSS for a lot of text elements. Also, you can render and rasterize fonts + dynamic text to a texture and UV map it to a quad in 3D space if you need to. This is pretty inexpensive and easy to do as well. Lastly, the most difficult but performant option is usi…
I recommend the second option. Rasterize your font with stb_truetype to a bitmap, and draw quads yourself
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The OS runs on hardware, what do you think is below the OS you're running? Even excluding VMs, there are a lot of OSes running in a modern computer. Some chips have their own. BIOSes and Secure Enclave, networking chips, and probably a dozen more.
Try to understand the context of more than one comment at a time if you can. This person said "it's turtles all the way down" because there are two layers, the browser and the OS, which is ridiculous.
Try not to be a condescending dickweed, if you can.
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Browsers are just “standardised” OS at this point. Really, what is the difference? It seems to me that people basically wants a 1 to 1 mapping between every OS feature to browsers. I wouldn’t be surprised if this standard will fall apart in the next decade once Chrome runs everything. That is to say Chrome is the standard. I am already seeing websites drop support for Firefox and won’t even load using it.
> I am already seeing websites drop support for Firefox Examples?
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Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web. It's nowadays also a cross-platform insta-deployment GUI application runtime environment with mostly bad native OS integration and performance characteristics (both ~improving, there's even native filesystem access now). In any case it's Good Enough (C), so it sticks.
> Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web. Free yourself from the notion that a web browser should do anything more than browsing the web. native applications have existed for decades, no reason to bloat the scope of a browser.
You seem to demand that people ignore this reality, because you don't like it. This is not helpful.
I don't like this reality either, but despite that I find your statement also factually incorrect: "native applications have existed for decades, no reason to bloat the scope of a browser".
Of course there are reasons, otherwise people/companies won't do it, and users won't use bloated browser that give them no benefits.
I agree that downsides outweigh the upsides, but the upsides are obvious and immediate while the downsides are long-term and mostly subtle...
Question for discussion: when have we reached the point where the Browser Feature-creep is too much and we say "okay, a browser probably doesn't need this"? Because after seeing WebUSB and WebGPU I think my personal limit has been reached.
Why exactly would programs running in web browsers not want the ability to access the most powerful piece of hardware in a users machine? WGPU unlocks an enormous amount of space for userland programs to explore. I agree there have been some questionable 'advancements' in the web spec recently (web workers as a solution to multithreading, for example, were hilariously inadequate for quite a while), but as far as I ca…