> ¹² If I were a cynical, paranoid conspiracy theorist, I would float the theory here that Apple at some point decided they wanted to leave open the capability to sue the other video card developers on the Khronos board, so they are aggressively refusing to let their code touch anything that has touched the Vulkan patent pool to insulate themselves from counter-suits. Or that is what I would say if I were a cynical, paranoid conspiracy theorist. Hypothetically.

Such a shame that they lobbied against SPIR-V on the web. Textual formats are evil.

The entire web has been built on textual formats though, and quite successfully so.

Even without Apple in the way, SPIRV as it is wouldn't have been usable for WebGPU: http://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html

Laaas

I wonder whether you could have used a slightly modified WebAssembly instead.

flohofwoe

That wouldn't have been all that different from WGSL though, the most important thing is that whatever WebGPU uses for its shaders can be translated to and from SPRIV (e.g. via https://dawn.googlesource.com/tint and https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga).