gpu.js

You might already be familiar, but a GPU.js backend can provide some speedups via good old WebGL -- no need for WebGPU just yet! [0]: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/

Very cool project. I learned WebGL three years ago but before I dove into the underlying concepts I used GPU.js [1] to quickly prototype my project. Eventually, the abstraction prevented necessary performance optimizations so I switched to vanilla GLSL and these vanilla GLSL "shaders" were initially ejected from GPU.js. Writing JS code then looking at the generated WebGPU output is a great way to get familiar with WebGPU. Thanks for this. [1] https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/

This library transpiles JS to WebGL which allows computations to run in parallel on the GPU instead of one by one on the main JS thread. I used this library to prototype shademap but I think it's no longer maintained. I PRed a fix to correct atan2 over a year ago and no movement [1]. Because this library optimized for simplicity over performance, switching to vanilla WebGL will get you better performance (especially with textures) in the long run. I do highly recommend it if you're a web developer interested in harnessing parallel processing. [1] https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/pull/683

Correct PR link: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/pull/768

Thanks for pointing this out. I've submitted a PR to resolve this: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/issues/757 That being said, if you're not building from source (you're running an LTS version of node on a supported platform), you don't need to worry about python or many of the build deps.

In a nutshell, type inference: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js#types Implementation for web-gl: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/blob/1be50c09ed4edb7c7e846b1...

Your comment probably got downed more drastically than normal for being a new account but on the off chance you're a legitimate new account that just had an unlucky first comment: It's compatible with both web and Node. In Node it uses https://github.com/stackgl/headless-gl to provide a WebGL compatible implementation as Node doesn't ship with GPU access out of the box. The project is looking into https://github.com/maierfelix/webgpu or similar to instead provide Node with a WebGPU compatible implementation. Both require N-API. The tracking issue can be found here for reference https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/issues/507.

I checked, "Get WebGPU as an alternate backend (help wanted)" > We need this [WebGPU] in GPU.js, possibly as a sub-project: https://github.com/maierfelix/webgpu Once it becomes stable, and well supported and tested, we could possibly make it the default fallback. https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/issues/507

I disagree. JavaScript historically has always offered backward compatibility. > Backwards compatibility is important because of the large number of browsers deployed and the wide variety of versions of those browsers [0]. This may be the reasoning behind offering backwards compatibility. Also, according to the GitHub page [1] the fallbacks are WebGL2, and WebGL 1, and if neither of those work, only then will it use the CPU when in the browser. I find this to be quite acceptable. After all, it is JavaScript! [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4937245/why-is-javascrip... [1] https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/wiki/Quick-Concepts#fallback

Graceful pure JavaScript fallback when GPU is not available. This is a bad thing, not a happy thing to be advertised. Software fallback was of the most frustrating parts of working with OpenGL circa 2010. If you're making a hardware accelerated library, stop trying to make it "gracefully" fail. Just fail! That way people can address the root problem. On the other hand, as long as the library is sufficiently noisy about the fact that it's in CPU mode, it seems fine. I just hope they don't follow OpenGL's design decisions. It's surprisingly hard to figure out the answer from the README: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/#readme There's a "How to check what's supported" section, but it's also "mostly for unit tests."

I love this comment in the code: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js/blob/develop/src/backend/web... // Here be dragons! // DO NOT OPTIMIZE THIS CODE // YOU WILL BREAK SOMETHING ON SOMEBODY\'S MACHINE // LEAVE IT AS IT IS, LEST YOU WASTE YOUR OWN TIME

Also: https://github.com/gpujs/gpu.js Note: this is what brain.js is shifting over to. It uses the... GPU.