WebGPU Bindings for LuaJIT

LuaJIT FFI bindings for the WebGPU implementations from Mozilla (webgpu-native) and Google (dawn)

Note: Despite the name, WebGPU does not involve browsers or JavaScript. It's a 3D API abstraction with its own spec.

What can I do with it?

Submit work to your GPU, from Lua. In a way that's completely cross-platform and that doesn't require using OpenGL.

Why would anyone want to do that?

WebGPU is somewhat more usable (by mere mortals) than most of the modern "low-level" graphics APIs, and Lua is arguably less annoying to work with than C/C++ or JavaScript/TypeScript. That's just my personal opinion, of course, but I see quite some potential in the idea of combining both, which is why I wanted to explore it further. This might not be a good idea at all, but there's really no telling until you've tried! And that's what this repository is for.

Why use WebGPU and not DX12/Vulkan/Metal?

Using WebGPU over OpenGL or Vulkan/Metal/DirectX12 has many advantages. Some people believe it's "the future".

While I don't know about that, I do know a few things:

• DirectX is Microsoft-proprietary and doesn't work on other platforms
• Metal is Apple-proprietary and doesn't work on other platforms
• Vulkan doesn't work on many platforms (and its design is... contentious)
• WebGPU has major industry buyin and is definitely a step up from OpenGL

All in all, targeting WebGPU as a backend certainly seems better than writing low-level rendering code multiple times.

Goals

For now, I mainly seek to answer a few key questions to determine whether this is even a viable approach:

• Determine feasibility: Evaluate performance and maintainability in the face of upstream changes
• Cross-platform support: Investigate functionality and performance on MSVC, MSYS2, OSX, and Linux
• Backend-agnostic: Test whether it works using either the Firefox or the Chrome implementation

If all goes well I might build some more high-level abstractions on top to make it easy to use (details are TBD).

Status

Prototype, proof of concept, or whatever you want to call "I had this crazy idea and I want to try out if it works".

UPDATE: Development here is currently halted as I've moved WebGPU support into the runtime itself. This may change in the future.

Roadmap

• Auto-generate FFI bindings from the WebGPU C API headers
• Initial testing using Mozilla's webgpu-native backend on Windows
• Extend testing to native Linux and OSX platforms
• Add some examples to test different (basic) rendering scenarios
• Performance evaluation of the FFI bindings in the above scenarios
• Optionally support dawn as an alternative backend
• Optionally publish prebuilt releases of the examples/dependencies (GLFW and WebGPU extensions)
• Add some better documentation to replace the rather basic README file