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by wokwokwok 813 days ago
> A renderlet is more of a graphics plugin system than an entire first-party app.

I see.

So this is basically flash?

A high level API to build binary application bundles (aka .swf files, ie. renderlets) and a runtime that lets you execute arbitrary applications in a sandbox.

renderlet = .swf file

wander = flash runtime

renderlet compiler = magic sauce, macromedia flash editor

yeah?

> Let's take an example - Temporal Anti-Aliasing. There are libraries that exist to implement this, or you can implement it through raw code.

Mhm. You can certainly do it in a cross platform way using webGPU, but I suppose I can see the vision of 'just download this random binary and it'll add SMAA' but it sounds a lot like "and then we'll have a marketplace where people can buy and sell GPU plugins" or "if you're building a web browser" rather than "and this is something that is useful to someone developing a visualization application from scratch".

The majority of these features could exist with just a C++ library and no requirement to 'pre-compile' some of your code into a renderlet... hosting external arbitrary 3rd party binaries in your application seems... niche.

Really, the only reason you would normally ever not just do it from source as a monolithic part of your application was if you didn't have the source code for some reason (eg. because you bought it as a WASM binary from someone).

Smells like Flash, and I'm not sure I like that, but I guess I can see the vision now, thanks for explaining.