simd

WebAssembly programming is simply easier than GPU programming. My game here [0] 6 years ago uses WebAssembly with a Finite Difference approach for the fluid part. Nowadays, fixed-width SIMD [1] is standardized and supported in the browser. But I don't now any website using it. I have tried porting it to WebGPU. It is much more complicated and only Chrome supports it right now. To get fluid simulation working via the older standard WebGL is more like a hack. [0| https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service [1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd/blob/master/proposals/si...

wasm has SIMD extension https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd/blob/master/proposals/si... . You can use them even in browsers (e.g. Chrome >= 91)

For current status ("phase 3" as that link says is maybe not obvious enough), there is a solid spec and multiple implementations, see the "Fixed-width SIMD" line here: https://webassembly.org/roadmap/ And here is an overview of this spec: https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd/blob/master/proposals/si...

Unfortunately, this feature is (still) stuck behind an origin trial and requires serving three different WebAssembly binaries to get correct fallback behavior across different browsers. Feature detection for WebAssembly[0] is stuck in spec discussions, and SIMD general availability is blocked on either that or its own mechanism for backwards compatibility[1]. The issue is that a WebAssembly binary that contains instructions unknown to the engine (e.g. SIMD instructions not supported by a particular engine) won't validate, even if the functions aren't used at runtime. The only way to work around this is to compile your binary NxMx... times and detect which feature set is supported before loading a binary. It's a real pain in the tail when trying to support new WebAssembly features. e.g. check out this snippet from canvas.apps.chrome whic

One nice feature missing that's important for video decoding efficiency is SIMD. It's being worked on, but not ready yet: https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd

There's a proposal for SIMD but it's not in any shipping browsers AFAIK. https://github.com/WebAssembly/simd/blob/master/proposals/si...