Re: Shadow demo for WebGPU-native

Hey Dzmitry,

Thanks for sharing this, demos like this show that the API is starting to
be well-rounded and your feedback is very valuable given your background in
rendering engines for games! Can you file a bug / add an item in the
snapshot tracker for the usability issues you found?

Cheers,

Corentin

On Sat, Feb 23, 2019 at 5:04 AM Dzmitry Malyshau <dmalyshau@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> Hi WebGPU!
>
> I've been working ([1]) on an example to test and polish our native WebGPU
> implementation, called "shadow". See the attached screenshot to get the
> idea. Just wanted to share a bit of feedback, now that I got a slight idea
> about what it is to *use* the API as opposed to designing it:
>
>    1. Overall, the experience was very pleasant ([2]). I believe we are
>    aiming for the right level of abstraction for the web: low enough to be
>    efficient, high enough to actually be able to write the demo and not drown
>    in details.
>    2. Some of the structures are unbalanced. For example,
>    GPURasterizationStateDescriptor has most of the fields related to depth
>    biasing. It would be cleaner to have all the depth biasing in a dedicated
>    structure instead.
>    3. I find GLSL with Vulkan syntax to be pretty nice to use. It
>    addresses the biggest problem GLSL has - separating textures and samplers
>    ([3]), along with specifying all the bind group/binding registers
>    explicitly. I see value in it being well supported by WebGPU (not a as
>    digested format), given that the current users of WebGL would have easier
>    time moving to that syntax than to HLSL.
>
>
>
> Note: the example is written in Rust, but it's just a light wrapper over C
> API library (wgpu-native). The idea is for it to be compatible with Dawn,
> and also to gain the ability to target WASM in the future.
>
> Links:
>
> [1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/71
>
> [2]
> https://github.com/kvark/wgpu/blob/616a3dd849c87db72db37d534bb21ddc700a2165/gfx-examples/src/shadow.rs
>
> [3]
> https://github.com/kvark/wgpu/blob/616a3dd849c87db72db37d534bb21ddc700a2165/gfx-examples/data/shadow-forward.frag#L45
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Dzmitry
>