[kypro]

WebGL still requires shader code I believe, and also uses graphic-specific terminology. My understanding is that there is no high-level native API for compute-specific use-cases. You are currently forced to use an API intended for graphics and then create abstracts for compute yourself.

I believe GPU.js exists to fill this void and facilitate simple GPU compute on the web without the need for all of the graphic-specific terminology and boiler plate code. But why a 3rd party library is needed for this makes little sense to me since a high-level native GPU (or hybrid) compute API seems like a great way to optimise many JS projects on the web today.

I must be missing something though because this seems like such a no brainer that if it was possible it would already be a thing.

[MindSpunk]

Put briefly:

GPUs don't work like CPUs, at all, and need to massaged carefully to run efficiently. You can't just give a GPU an `int main()` and go ham. The APIs we get to use (DX12, Vulkan, Metal, WGPU) are all designed to abstract several GPU vendor's hardware architectures into an API that's just low-level enough to be efficient without forcing the app to explicitly target each GPU itself. There's no one way to run fast on everything with more than a trivial program.

As for why no 'universal high-level native GPU compute API' exists, GPU vendors don't want them because it's too much effort to implement. They'd much rather everything go through a low-level interface like Vulkan and the high level stuff get done by 'someone else' consuming Vulkan. Each new 'universal' API requires buy-in from 4+ different hardware vendors. Someone needs to painstaking specify the API. Each vendor must implement the API. Those implementations will be broken, just look at Android drivers, and now your 'simple' universal API is actually 4 different APIs that look almost the same except for strange esoteric behavior that appears on some hardware that is completely undocumented.

This is what OpenGL was and is why Vulkan, DX12 and Metal exist. The universal 'simple' API doesn't exist because it's too hard to make and not useful enough for the people programming GPUs regularly.

[Chabsff]

Standard web APIs are a lot like kernel-level OS features. They have a ton of inertia to them, so they arguably should be limited to stuff that is infeasible in "userland". (There are additional reasons for that in the case of OSs, but that's the relevant one here).

If you had such a high-level API baked in, it would get leapfrogged by some library project within a few years, and then we'd be stuck with yet another API to support that no one actually uses.