I was in the minutes. Just because it's text doesn't mean it's driven by Apple.

Apple clearly says it's not an option because of a legal dispute. If everyone else is at the negotiating table, but Apple says absolutely NO, how is that decision not driven by Apple?

Apple vetoes SPIR-V binary as an option. Google develops a language based on SPIR-V semantics that we agree on. It's clear that at least today, Google is mainly driving WGSL. They also see the value in WGSL outside of WebGPU context. Claiming the Apple primary role in this is ridiculous.

> Claiming the Apple primary role in this is ridiculous.

It's apple that didn't want SPIRV and insisted on something else, preferably text based. Doesn't matter who is doing that something else now, it's done because of Apple... Which I'm not entirely a fan of because I don't think apple's history in WebGL, OpenGL and graphics makes them deserve the leverage they're getting.

So how is it supposed to work in practice? Pages will ship SPIR-V and will be converted to WGSL just for Apple on the fly, or pages will ship WGSL, and it will be converted to SPIR-V on the fly for everyone else?

I surely hope not the later, let Apple pay performance price for being the root of the problem.

Many Web applications will just ship WGSL. This includes everything going through Three.js, Babylon.js, and hand-written web apps.

It's not even clear if Chrome or Firefox will accept SPIR-V binary as an extension at this point.

Anyway, conversion to and from SPIR-V is supposed to be straightforward and light. Our (speaking for gfx-rs community) Rust-based shader infrastructure will handle that , and the converter should be easily compilable to wasm (when it's ready).

Anyway x2, most of the time in the whole picture of creating pipelines will be spent in the driver, so whatever parsing performance difference WGSL brings to the table, be it 5% or 10%, doesn't matter, you aren't going to see that in benchmarks because of that other stuff that's going on when you are creating a pipeline.

It would still be good for Firefox and Chrome to accept SPIR-V bytecode (in addition to WGSL). This way you can write some client side library, that converts SPIR-V on the fly to WGSL for crippled browsers (Apple) and use SPIR-V directly for everyone else.

I hope Mozilla and Google won't cave that way to this Apple's idiotic behavior.

I don't think there will be a significant performance problem because the generated machine code can be cached.