Use JuliaWGPU ecosystem for GPU support

[VarLad]

It provides the most widely compatible vs powerful backend for writing GPU shaders at the moment.
I'll try looking into this at some point.

[Kyjor]

Admittedly, I am not knowledgeable enough to even know what this could do/how it can integrate here. I would love more information about this.

[VarLad]

@Kyjor Sorry for the late reply.
Think of WebGPU as an OpenGL replacement for writing GPU stuff.
Its not as verbose as Vulkan, and is well supported by web browsers as well.

I was trying to recommend it as a replacement for OpenGL for your:

The plan for 3d will be to use OpenGL.

As a bonus, WebGPU compiles to Vulkan on Linux, Metal on MacOS, DirectX11/12 on Windows and is supported directly in the browser.
You can get the best performance for all platforms with one API.

There's some effort to write good Julia bindings for WebGPU over in: https://github.com/JuliaWGPU/
You can read more about WebGPU itself here:
https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API

[Kyjor]

That sounds very promising! I don't think I'll have the bandwidth for 3d at all this year if things go the way I think. A lot of this year will be spent refining the editor tools in the engine. But that's definitely interesting, and I would be open to any contributions to make that happen sooner than expected! 😄

[Kyjor]

Update: This year I plan on learning some 3d, and make the engine more agnostic to different rendering backends. Not sure if I'll get to WebGPU this year though, but I should make it feasible!

[VarLad]

@Kyjor Hey! Thanks for messaging! Does it make sense to try and wrap Sokol in Julia as a library?
I have been trying to compile this for BinaryBuilder and then wrap it but running into some issues.
Its already used for a game engine, and its massively cross platform and quite easy to use :)

[Kyjor]

@VarLad I'd at least like to play around with it! If I architect things right, it should be possible to use it in JulGame!