| > This doesn't really make sense for IR. IR is not meant to be human writeable. It's meant to be generated by a compiler. So, having a one to one mapping between concept and name in the IR is a feature, not a bug. Do you consider the name for a type to be a part of the concept? SPIR-V doesn't.
Overall, if you wanted one-to-one mapping, at least that would be consistent. But SPIR-V decided to require this only for simple types, while you can still have duplicate composite types. > Honestly, WGSL just repeats the JavaScript mistake: where we should have started with something like WASM instead of JavaScript. And JS could have been just one of the many languages that targeted WASM. We don't know if Web would be nearly as successful if it started with WASM instead of JS. The ability to just open a text editor and make a web page has served well in the early days. > We were this close to not repeating this mistake by adopting an IR language (SPIR-V) for WebGPU, but then that got abandoned mostly for political reasons. Look at the situation today: the very same people who were rooting for SPIR-V are currently introducing features the diverge WGSL away from SPIR-V, further and further. It's quite telling, I think. The moral of the story is: regardless of reasons (which we can argue a ton), WG members admit that what we ideally need is not SPIR-V, and this is supported by the way WGSL is shaping. |
And you would be able to do that just fine. All you'd need to do is include the JS compiler (helpfully hosted at http://cdn.google.com/ecmascript-2015.wasm) in the <head> of the HTML file's script tag, open a text editor and type away. Or, you know, include a more sane language like typescript, or python. Heck even lisp if you're so inclined. Or, and this is like totally crazy, but say you need performance, and want tight control over memory layout and allocations, then go for C or rust! Oh and no need to minify your JS. Just ship the WASM precompiled. Save on browser compilation time and network bytes at the same time. So long as you generate WASM that the browser understands use whatever lang makes you happy. Type it right into a text editor and include the compiler in the head of the HTML. Easy peasy.
It's without question that JS has held back web development for decades. Of course, people didn't know any better back then, and really JS was added as almost an afterthought, so we can't really blame them for getting it wrong.
We do know better now though. And still we get WGSL. Looking forward to 2041, when we finally get WGASM. The hottest new thing in web gpu technologies.