Live data from Hacker News

OpenGL to WASM, learning from my mistakes

uds5501.github.io

1–10 of 28 posts

Re: OpenGL to WASM, learning from my mistakes

#6
This is a very confusing article that doesn’t make much sense to me. The authors runs into performance limits on their laptop and states

> maybe it’s time to port this to the web and not my machine be a blocker for the demo.

So their solution is to port from C++ and OpenGL to WASM and WebGL. Last I checked WASM and WebGL all ran on the local machine, how on earth would porting to WebGL and WASM allow the author to make their “machine be a blocker for the demo”. They’re not changing any of the hardware involved, and they’re barely changing the technologies involved.

Re: OpenGL to WASM, learning from my mistakes

#7

This is a very confusing article that doesn’t make much sense to me. The authors runs into performance limits on their laptop and states > maybe it’s time to port this to the web and not my machine be a blocker for the demo. So their solution is to port from C++ and OpenGL to WASM and WebGL. Last I checked WASM and WebGL all ran on the local machine, how on earth would porting to WebGL and WASM allow the author to ma…

WebGL runs on the same machine but uses a very different path to the GPU. On Mac, OpenGL is deprecated and the implementation is very outdated and feature poor. WebGL is not deprecated, and uses the ANGLE library to run on top of Metal.

Re: OpenGL to WASM, learning from my mistakes

#9
post #7

This is a very confusing article that doesn’t make much sense to me. The authors runs into performance limits on their laptop and states > maybe it’s time to port this to the web and not my machine be a blocker for the demo. So their solution is to port from C++ and OpenGL to WASM and WebGL. Last I checked WASM and WebGL all ran on the local machine, how on earth would porting to WebGL and WASM allow the author to ma…

WebGL runs on the same machine but uses a very different path to the GPU. On Mac, OpenGL is deprecated and the implementation is very outdated and feature poor. WebGL is not deprecated, and uses the ANGLE library to run on top of Metal.

From what I know, OpenGL on macOS is internally implemented using Metal and supports more features than ANGLE.

ANGLE on macOS supports OpenGL ES 3.0 when running using Metal backend (source: https://github.com/google/angle), whereas macOS natively supports Core 4.1.

And from my experience, there is basically no difference in performance between Apple's implementation and ANGLE, especially for simple things like what the author is doing.

Re: OpenGL to WASM, learning from my mistakes

#10
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebGL runs on the same machine but uses a very different path to the GPU. On Mac, OpenGL is deprecated and the implementation is very outdated and feature poor. WebGL is not deprecated, and uses the ANGLE library to run on top of Metal.

From what I know, OpenGL on macOS is internally implemented using Metal and supports more features than ANGLE. ANGLE on macOS supports OpenGL ES 3.0 when running using Metal backend (source: https://github.com/google/angle ), whereas macOS natively supports Core 4.1. And from my experience, there is basically no difference in performance between Apple's implementation and ANGLE, especially for simple things like what…

I don't have internal knowledge of Apple's implementation but it could potentially be layered on top of Metal for Apple Silicon (probably not for Intel) though if so it probably uses internal-only capabilities not exposed to Metal users.

OpenGL ES 3.0 is newer than OpenGL 4.1. The feature set is broadly very similar. Native macOS OpenGL is a backwards compatibility feature and not intended for new development. Lack of KHR_debug and general bugginess makes it a poor choice for learning OpenGL or deploying software on. On the other hand, WebGL is currently supported and extensively tested, with much better validation and error messages and much (much, much) better cross platform compatibility.

Post reply on HN