Khronos + W3C Collaborating On SPIR-V Potentially Being The Shading Language For The Web

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Khronos + W3C Collaborating On SPIR-V Potentially Being The Shading Language For The Web

The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SPIR-V-Possible-WebGPU

[wizard69]

Wouldn’t this be a massive security issue?

[kpedersen]

"Seeing SPIR-V as the "web shading language" is quite tantalizing"

SPIR-V is more like the bytecode right? You get a GLSL (or HLSL) to SPIR-V compiler and generate the bytecode to upload to the GPU.
So I am assuming that GLSL will remain the shader language of the web since most compilers seem to take in that?

[GunpowaderGuy]

how does webgpu currently stand overhead wise ? is this api significantly higher level than a vulkan version for web sandboxing would have been ?
( i think one atttemp at it was called obsidian ) is it lower level than apple's original proposal or metal 1.0 ?

[rastersoft]

"Seeing SPIR-V as the "web shading language" is quite tantalizing"

SPIR-V is more like the bytecode right? You get a GLSL (or HLSL) to SPIR-V compiler and generate the bytecode to upload to the GPU.
So I am assuming that GLSL will remain the shader language of the web since most compilers seem to take in that?

Maybe the idea is to integrate SPIR-V in the same way than webasm, by distributing "precompiled binaries" that are recompiled to the native instruction set in the browser.

[shmerl]

Good. Stinky Apple tries hard to derail using SPIR-V for WebGPU though, because otherwise it would highlight their total lack of support for Vulkan. Hopefully those crooks will be pushed aside and progress will prevail.

[programmerjake]

Wouldn’t this be a massive security issue?

all that's needed is to verify the shaders before sending them to the driver and to enable Vulkan's robustness mode. glsl is actually more of a security issue due to the increased driver complexity.

[microcode]

Wouldn’t this be a massive security issue?

More than GLSL? Absolutely not. SPIR-V is a fixed-width encoding that can be translated rather simply with a state machine.

[programmerjake]

More than GLSL? Absolutely not. SPIR-V is a fixed-width encoding that can be translated rather simply with a state machine.

it's actually waaay more complex than that, assuming you want the shaders to run at any decent speed, but it is much simpler than glsl.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Good. Stinky Apple tries hard to derail using SPIR-V for WebGPU though, because otherwise it would highlight their total lack of support for Vulkan. Hopefully those crooks will be pushed aside and progress will prevail.

Apple invented WebGPU. SPIR-IV is far slower but having that as an option for Non-Apple platforms makes sense as long as both are conformant to the WebGPU standard.