My wife mocks me every time I ask for a "bagel", and I still can't hear the difference. I am a Midwest tourist on a coast.

Use the platform! A partial dependency graph…

Scary when you install *any* version of emacs. 😝

Ha, reminds me of my wife’s story of one of her classmates accidentally mugging someone in Morningside Park, NYC. He’d had his—apparently very unique—watch stolen. Soon after, he saw someone in the park wearing it. “That’s my watch!” After they fled, he looked closely and realized it wasn’t his.

Nice! That's a delightfully aggressive volume.

This is great! Thanks for the tips! I've updated the notebook accordingly and have also submitted a PR which you'd probably right to summarily dismiss, though maybe it communicates tricky spots I had to navigate to get it integrated into a proper site. github.com/observablehq...

SkittleBrau

Now, beginning to learn WebGPU, I’m trying to err on the side of unadorned inconvenience, if it means getting a better handle on WebGPU. Even lovely toolkits, at this particular moment, aren’t what I was searching for, though I do plan to return to these once I begin to understand what’s underneath.

But after a couple/few years of building on it, I eventually realized that I didn’t actually know the underlying WebGL APIs and primitives, however unpleasant they may be. When I really got into the corner cases and advanced features, it became a bit of a hindrance.

I’m sorry if that came across as a jab! It actually looks really cool. Here’s the context: I got into modern graphics via Mikola Lysenko’s regl library. It was like WebGL, but stateless! And fun! It didn’t add many abstractions on top of WebGL. I got a lot of mileage out of it (and still do).

And got this answer from Brandon Jones over on Mastodon: mathstodon.xyz/@tojiro@mast...

Oh wow, and well-done, but maximalist: docs.swmansion.com/TypeGPU/.

Nice! Thanks. webgpu-utils looks quite nice. I'd found this library: www.npmjs.com/package/@tim..., which looks convenient, but perhaps a bit heavier-feeling than what I was looking for. I'm still learning the basic WebGPU APIs, so I don't want to abstract much, just the inconvenient parts.

Oh, should have tagged #webgpu #wgsl so someone can (hopefully) explain why I’m an idiot for thinking I need to do this. Expecting some “just use slang” or something, but as cool as such things are, I’m after the minimum assistance required to make plain WebGPU effective to explore.

I'm somewhat keen on figuring out bottom-up parsers, but I'm also relatively happy with the relative simplicity of the recursive-descent logic, e.g. the code to parse attribute @align(32) or @size(4):

I could have defined some DSL for defining structs with a bit less code than a parser, but it seems awful to reinvent a language for defining WebGPU structs when WGSL is already the correct language for it.

FWIW problem I'm trying so solve is: Plain WebGPU is turning out to be relatively pleasant to use, but wow, manually managing the memory layout of WebGPU structs (defining, comprehending, packing data) seems completely untenable without some sort of assistance or guardrails.

I’ve switched to half-caf buckets of coffee, not so I consume half the caffeine, but so I can consume twice the coffee.