Show HN: HipScript – Run CUDA in the browser with WebAssembly and WebGPU

From the "Learn More" link (https://lights0123.com/blog/2025/01/07/hip-script/):

"By chaining chipStar¹ (a HIP and NVIDIA® CUDA® to OpenCL compiler), Clspv² (an OpenCL to Vulkan compiler), and Tint³ (among others, a Vulkan shader to WebGPU shader compiler), you can run CUDA code in the browser!"

¹ https://github.com/CHIP-SPV/chipStar/ ² https://github.com/google/clspv/ ³ https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn/+/refs/heads/main/src/tin...

Firefox supports WebGPU, but needs a setting in about:config. I enabled the setting but HipScript still denies running on Firefox with the message: "Please try a Chromium-based browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge."

Please do feature detection, not browser detection.

The GoL example it loaded with seemed to be running way slower than I expected it to. It turns out that there's actually a `usleep(1000 * 100)` call in the code which was inserted to make it easier to see the output; the actual kernels execute quickly and take up very little GPU time.

When I looked at the profiler, I was confused to see that one worker thread was at 100% usage the whole time it was running. At first, I thought that maybe it was actually running the code via Wasm on the CPU rather than on the GPU like it said.

Instead, it turns out that the worker was just running `emscripten_futex_wait` - which as far as I can tell is implemented by busy waiting in a loop. Probably doesn't matter for performance since I imagine that's just for the sleep call anyway.

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Altogether this is an incredibly cool tool. I'm sure there is some performance gap compared to native, but even so this is a extremely impressive and likely has a ton of potential use cases.

Very cool. Thank you for creating this!

How is this different than web-llm?