Re: WebGPU polyfill using WebGL2 - would it be feasible and/or make sense?

A while ago I also played around with a partial webgpu-on-webgl2:
https://github.com/jdashg/webgpu-js

It was interesting to experiment with what to do with the binding model,
which is a definite challenge.
You can see one approach I came up with:
https://jdashg.github.io/webgpu-js/hello-bind-groups.html

Lack of Compute and other advanced features can be a real deal-breaker, but
it's certainly possible to make something that's useful for many usecases.

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:41 AM Myles C. Maxfield <mmaxfield@apple.com>
wrote:

> All Web APIs are, of course, welcome to be pollyfilled to the extent that
> it's possible. Creating a 3D renderer which looks a lot like the WebGPU
> API, and has backends for WebGPU and WebGL, sounds like a valuable thing to
> have.
>
> Beware, there are some places that are tricky to polyfill today. Chief
> among them is the fact that, in WebGL, textures and samplers are joined
> into a single API object, but in WebGPU, they are distinct objects. This
> set of difficult-or-impossible to pollyfill parts of WebGPU will likely
> increase over time, rather than decrease.
>
> The standardization group discussed something similar in May; you can read
> the minutes at
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QCnrt5Dd563PQyCiP8UkVrWgsFCWVCLLMxiMx5Fl23A/edit# (see
> the section titled WebGPU compat). The discussion was about the possibility
> of reducing or eliminating these difficult parts, so WebGPU might be
> implementable on OpenGL, which would dramatically increase the possibility
> of polyfilling. However, I believe that discussion ended with the
> conclusion that it would be difficult to accomplish this without also
> limiting the ability for the WebGPU API to grow and improve beyond what
> OpenGL allows.
>
> If you do come up with a library which acts similarly to the WebGPU API,
> and renders to WebGL, I’m sure this group would love to hear your findings
> and discoveries while making such a thing. This type of feedback is
> valuable when designing any kind of 3D graphics API, including WebGPU. I’m
> looking forward to hear back from you on your discoveries!
>
> Thanks,
> Myles
>
> On Nov 20, 2019, at 5:48 AM, Eamon O'Tuathail <eamon.otuathail@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> WebGPU and WebGL2 do not provide the exact same feature set, but there is
> a good bit of overlap. For early adopter web application developers eager
> to get started with WebGPU now, would a polyfill of a subset of WebGPU
> features implemented using WebGL2 be feasible and/or make sense?
>
> WebGL2 is widely available today in production web browsers:
>   https://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl2
> and WebGPU, though progressing nicely, still has a long way to go before
> that.
>
> So what are the options for web application developers who want to use
> some parts of WebGPU in production code today? A polyfill would seem the
> best. A polyfill will not give the same level of performance as a native
> WebGPU implementation or the full feature set, but may be sufficient for
> certain deployment scenarios - such as code samples in training courses,
> product demos, proof of concept projects. etc.. It would not be suitable
> for heavy-duty gaming or other intensive 3D rendering workloads - that is
> accepted.
>
>
>