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Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

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Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#11
post #7

This is exciting > The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari. Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is st…

JavaScript is useless for data exploration, that's why very little data scientist uses JavaScript and all kinds of none white spaces languages. Curly braces doesn't work well in iterative explorative programming

"Languages with curly braces are categorically useless for data exploration" is certainly ... a take.

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#12

I gotta admit at the outset I was more than a little sceptical of WebGPU for ML in general but now I have much greater respect for the usefulness of local inference as part of a webapp and the increasing ability to actually run a quantized models in the browser. Glad I was wrong !

Why were you skeptical of it originally? I wrote about this coming to pass over a year ago now: https://fleetwood.dev/posts/a-case-for-client-side-machine-l...

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#13

Now all that's left to do is to integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno (create a window with a WebGPU canvas, receive input events, audio buffer streaming) and it would be a nice little platform to build and distribute small games and graphics demos written in WebAssembly and/or Typescript :)

The initial WebGPU Standard Library is such a promising step in this direction!

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#14
post #7

This is exciting > The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari. Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is st…

JavaScript is useless for data exploration, that's why very little data scientist uses JavaScript and all kinds of none white spaces languages. Curly braces doesn't work well in iterative explorative programming

don't nobody tell him about this double bracket [[]] language called mathematica!

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#15

Now all that's left to do is to integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno (create a window with a WebGPU canvas, receive input events, audio buffer streaming) and it would be a nice little platform to build and distribute small games and graphics demos written in WebAssembly and/or Typescript :)

> integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno have you tried denog (fork of deno which uses winit for Windowing and also has WebGPU support)? https://github.com/denogdev/denog As for deno proper, according to this thread, it looks like one of the Deno maintainers has been working on Windowing support, also using winit (same as denog linked above) - https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/3265#issuecomment-14…

I'm curious why they needed to fork Deno to achieve this. There wasn't a way to achieve this as like a library/3rd party package/wrapper or something?

The fork is already ~1700 commits out of date with the original. How often would they sync, etc.?

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#16

This is exciting > The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari. Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is st…

> We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed

Outside of "everyone uses js", why do we believe this? What makes JS "ideal".

I would think for machine learning one would want:

- generally default to non-mutating, functional representation of ideas, with convenient escape hatches

- treats the GPU as a concurrent (or better yet, distributed) resource

- can seamlessly run ML code as either immediate or an optimized graph.

- could swap out compute resources as asynchronous rpc, like, flex out to something more powerful if available and needed

Certainly most of these are possible in JS, but I would hardly call it "ideal" for these bullet points, not to mention other general concerns like a highly questionable dependency management ecosystem.

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#17

Now all that's left to do is to integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno (create a window with a WebGPU canvas, receive input events, audio buffer streaming) and it would be a nice little platform to build and distribute small games and graphics demos written in WebAssembly and/or Typescript :)

Why wouldn't you just make a game that runs in a browser at that point?

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#18

This is exciting > The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari. Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is st…

> We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed Outside of "everyone uses js", why do we believe this? What makes JS "ideal". I would think for machine learning one would want: - generally default to non-mutating, functional representation of ideas, with convenient escape hatches - treats the GPU as a concurrent (or bett…

I'd love to use JS instead of Python for math/numerical stuff for many reasons, but without operator overloading it's just hell.

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#19

This is exciting > The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari. Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is st…

> We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed Outside of "everyone uses js", why do we believe this? What makes JS "ideal". I would think for machine learning one would want: - generally default to non-mutating, functional representation of ideas, with convenient escape hatches - treats the GPU as a concurrent (or bett…

probably just rushed writing. the Deno team are smart, I imagine they know there are better languages than JS for these sort of problems (technically)

giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they mean is that it's ideal having these capabilities accessible in JS since it can be run (almost) everywhere and there are a ton of developers who know JS

Re: Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

#20

Now all that's left to do is to integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno (create a window with a WebGPU canvas, receive input events, audio buffer streaming) and it would be a nice little platform to build and distribute small games and graphics demos written in WebAssembly and/or Typescript :)

Why wouldn't you just make a game that runs in a browser at that point?

Same reason why Electron exists, but in a much smaller bundle (since most of the actual browser engine wouldn't be included).

This would also be an opportunity to build better cross-platform APIs than what's available in browsers (e.g. WebAudio, fullscreen, pointer lock, text input (input in general), networking, ... are all a royal PITA on the web - basically any web API that isn't WebGL or WebGPU is mostly broken or half-assed).

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