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Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

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Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#21

Post by Narishma »

vlakreeh wrote: post #10
stickyricky wrote: post #6

What's the implication of using WebGPU? Better terminals in the browser? Better electron terminals? A quirk for better native portability?

Probably portability, it's a pretty good low (but not too low) abstraction layer over the systems preferred graphics API. I'm not a graphics programmer but my understanding is it's closer to vulkan or metal in terms of control over the hardware compared to OpenGL, which has rocky support on Mac now anyways.

It's not a clear win though. You gain some portability and lose some to platforms not supported by WebGPU.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#22

Post by Tade0 »

v3ss0n wrote: post #19
flashback2199 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Yeah I still can't understand the point of requiring GPU for terminals. What webgpu needed is graphics drawing applications are most graphics drawing apps on web are still using canvas 2d or SVG, not even webgl. If we are to build a graphic heavy tool like figma - all choices we have are mostly SVG.

Rendering text is surprisingly resource-intensive.

10 years ago I was tasked with making a mobile browser game and the thing that took 30% of the time when rendering a frame were the few bits of text that were there to display the score etc.

Once we started heavily caching text, performance increased considerably.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#23

Post by flashback2199 »

danstewart_ wrote: post #16
flashback2199 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks, I have edited my comment to meet the requirements of the community.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#24

Post by flashback2199 »

Tade0 wrote: post #22
v3ss0n wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I still can't understand the point of requiring GPU for terminals. What webgpu needed is graphics drawing applications are most graphics drawing apps on web are still using canvas 2d or SVG, not even webgl. If we are to build a graphic heavy tool like figma - all choices we have are mostly SVG.

Rendering text is surprisingly resource-intensive. 10 years ago I was tasked with making a mobile browser game and the thing that took 30% of the time when rendering a frame were the few bits of text that were there to display the score etc. Once we started heavily caching text, performance increased considerably.

Isn't rendering text inside a graphics framework and then saying that rendering text is surprisingly resource-intensive a bit like implementing an O(n log n) algorithm with nested for-loops and saying that the problem domain is surprisingly resource-intensive? Surely the thing that was causing text rendering to be resource-intensive was doing it inside a graphics framework?

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#25

Post by baudaux »

Narishma wrote: post #21
vlakreeh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably portability, it's a pretty good low (but not too low) abstraction layer over the systems preferred graphics API. I'm not a graphics programmer but my understanding is it's closer to vulkan or metal in terms of control over the hardware compared to OpenGL, which has rocky support on Mac now anyways.

It's not a clear win though. You gain some portability and lose some to platforms not supported by WebGPU.

I suppose it is just a question of time

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#27

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

norman784 wrote: post #9

My question is what's their selling point, I used the past few years few terminals that have pretty good features: - Alacritty minimal and blazingly fast - Wezterm with batteries included - Warp even batteries included

Kitty has the lowest latency and is the best terminal in the market, but they are not on windows.

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#29

Post by littlestymaar »

Narishma wrote: post #21
vlakreeh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably portability, it's a pretty good low (but not too low) abstraction layer over the systems preferred graphics API. I'm not a graphics programmer but my understanding is it's closer to vulkan or metal in terms of control over the hardware compared to OpenGL, which has rocky support on Mac now anyways.

It's not a clear win though. You gain some portability and lose some to platforms not supported by WebGPU.

What platform do you have in mind (given that WebGPU has at least 2 OpenGL backend, including one that supports WebGL)

Re: Rio: Terminal app built over WebGPU, WebAssembly and Rust

#30

Post by JdeBP »

I have news for whoever did that screen shot: 256 colours is not "all colours" nowadays. (-:

There was a real push, which must be approaching a decade ago at this point, to get all terminal emulators able to understand the ITU-T T.416 control sequences for direct 24-bit RGB colour. Even if they implement it really badly, and some do, almost everyone tries to support this colour system now.

See the screenshot of the old syscons FreeBSD kernel built-in terminal emulator at https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/110424206935120790 for what I mean by really badly. It still does understand the control sequences, though.

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