[pharrington]

You say Vulkan drivers will, for the forseeable future, be of lower quality than D3D12 drivers and lack official support. Lets assume I blindly accept this faith-based argument. WebGPU than, must be implemented on top of D3D12 and Metal, two already very different APIs. What, than, makes a hypothetical WebVulkan unfeasible in contrast to WebGPU?

[ioquatix]

Keep in mind that DX12 doesn't support Windows 7 or 8, so that cuts out a significant portion of the existing market.

[pjmlp]

Still higher than GNU/Linux will ever be.

[algo_cheese]

Not if you take Android into account.

[pjmlp]

Which is why I have precisely written GNU/Linux.

Android is a Java based OS, which happens to use Linux as kernel, Google can very easily change it to something else.

Only these set of C and C++ libraries are available to native applications on Android, which happen to be compiled to a .so anyway, to be loaded inside ART/Dalvik.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html

Trying to link into any other GNU/Linux library that happens to be on the devices, but isn't part of that list, will trigger an app termination, starting with Android 7.

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-...

Also, many POSIX APIs have been removed from the kernel and require extra wrapper libraries, if they can be emulated at all.

https://roxanageambasu.github.io/publications/eurosys2016pos...

https://thesai.org/Downloads/Volume4No7/Paper_15-POSIX.1_con...

[johnsmith21006]

It has the Linux kernel you just bring the GNU or whatever you need. But Google now supports containers on ChromeOS so if access you can just run in a container and the use Android X Windows server on same box.

If Google would gives this away have my perfect development solution. I can play my Android games on my 2 in 1 and then use full Linux when in laptop mode. But I can also debug my containers on my laptop as native.

But when needed I have sold browser and other core things can never be touched. Basically give me a iPad and a Chromebook and a full Linux development machine. Well no kernel dev on Linux but most things, native, shared read, etc.

But I want an extra SSD that is separate from the kernel SSD. I think this can be done and even keep read share from boot dev and something running as a container.

[algo_cheese]

Correct, Android is not GNU/Linux, I responded too fast. As the parent comment spoke about DirectX support, I should have phrased it 'Android is also in the camp of "Doesn't support DirectX" and counts for a large number of devices.'

[Rusky]

A hypothetical WebVulkan is tied to an API that it is guaranteed to have to translate from. A hypothetical WebGPU could simply be tweaked to better support its multiple target APIs.

[pharrington]

The straightforward translation and predictability of a hypothetical WebVulkan is a strong point in its favor. WebGPU's JavaScript interface can be changed arbitrarily, yes; there is nothing simple about that process.

[Rusky]

Vulkan (and similar APIs) are straightforward as translation targets, not so much as sources.

[AlphaSite]

Vulkan is a lower level API, so implementing it on higher level APIs becomes problematic.