[css-shaders] Exploring JS shaders

Carrying on from the [css-shaders] discussion on www-style, in which it 
has been proposed that webgl shaders
be usable through the css filter() property...

CSS Shaders editorial draft:
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/FXTF/raw-file/tip/custom/index.html


I'd like to explore the use of JS as an additional route for authors to 
write shaders.

The Web Workers specifications and Transferable semantics ( postMessage 
) are reasonable mature, nowadays.

There are now two implementations for parallelism in tight JavaScript loops:

W16 for the V8 JS Engine:
https://github.com/sheremetyev/w16

River Trail, a Firefox extension:
https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail


Web Workers is isolated and off-thread; the structured clone algorithm 
allows for transferring
buffers across threads without needing to copy the buffer. The recent 
parallel extensions for Firefox and V8
demonstrate that JS can be used across multiple cores, in an array 
programming style.

This seems like a natural progression.

Intel writing that River Trail can work well within existing semantics 
as well as Web GL:
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2011/09/pjs.php



-Charles

Received on Thursday, 20 October 2011 19:14:46 UTC