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Universal shader translation in Rust

Language: Rust

I want to talk about WebGPU | May 2023
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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).
WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas | Mar 2022
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Minor nitpick: this translation happens in separate libraries/tools which just make use of the SPIRVTools library for some SPIRV processing tasks, but not the actual translation to WGSL.

Tint (Google, implemented in C++): https://dawn.googlesource.com/tint/

Naga (Mozilla(?), implemented mostly in Rust): https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga

Both are a bit similar to SPIRV-Cross, except that they also support WGSL.
Porting WebGL Shaders to WebGPU | Oct 2021
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> What guarantees do you have it won't happen again?

Apple was pretty clear about their intent not to ship WebGL2, and they did the opposite for WebGPU so it's not gonna be the same story. Of course, I can't be 100% sure that Apple won't change their mind (like they eventually did for WebGL2) or anything, but there is no reason to believe they'll do so.

> Even if Apple had done it on time, it was a 2012 hardware API for 2017 hardware

Most games released in 2017 had to support hardware from 2012 anyway. Even AAA games released this year support GPU released in 2012[0]! For non AAA games, targeting a 5-years old API is probably the newest you can afford. We're not talking about bringing the bleeding edge GPU tech to the web (it won't, it's never standardised anyway, like Mesh shaders you talked about). The goal is to provide modern standardized tech to developers, and it does it in a portable way, which makes it even more affordable.

> Intel had two failed attempts to bring compute into the browser.

So what ?

> Yes it is a very bad thing, when Vulkan can keep using GLSL and HLSL, while DX12 happily will use any HLSL from the API history, and Metal can use proper C++14 shaders.

Vulkan uses SPIR-V, not HSL or GLSL. Translation tooling exist, but it also exists for WGSL -> SPIR-V[1]

Each platform has its own shading language, will this one be better than the other, I don't know but I don't think it's gonna be worse either.

> WGSL is web politics as usual.

Not really. See this summary[2] from a Mozilla gfx engineer:

[0]: https://support.activision.com/black-ops-cold-war/articles/m...

[1]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga

[2]: https://kvark.github.io/webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.component.html
Porting WebGL Shaders to WebGPU | Oct 2021
I took a very different approach for porting my WebGPU shaders over: I have far too many shaders to port (sometimes pretty massive ones! [0]), so I used Naga [1] at to runtime-translate my GLSL shaders to WGSL. I had to get involved a bit upstream to fix quite a few different bugs in the implementation, but once I got it working I was really happy with the result. It's quite fast, it compiles to a pretty light-weight WebAssembly module, and it works surprisingly well.

[0] https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website/blob/e15f8045cf262... [1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/naga/