WHLSL: Web High Level Shading Language
The article is full of inaccuracies, unfortunately. It mixes up the objective criteria W3C CG agreed upon with subjective claims of Apple, leading to WHLSL as a collaborative product of the group... it is not.<p>&gt; Last year, Apple established the WebGPU Community Group inside the W3C to standardize a new 3D graphics API which provides the benefits of these native APIs, but is also suitable for the Web environment. &lt;...&gt; All of the major browser vendors are participating and contributing to the standardization effort.<p>The browser vendors negotiated and agreed to proceed with W3C group (as opposed to Khronos&#x2F;WebGLNext). It&#x27;s a collaborative effort from day one (where all of Google, Mozilla, and Apple had prototypes), not exactly Apple-led like the article attempts to present it.<p>&gt; Forking the SPIR-V language means developers would have to recompile their shaders, possibly being forced to rewrite their source code anyway.<p>This (and the whole section about SPIR-V) reads like FUD to me.<p>&gt; Weirdly, this would mean on those two platforms, the starting point and the ending point are both human readable, but the bit in between is obfuscated with no benefit.<p>Inaccurate. The end point is always GPU machine code, and on the way there <i>all</i> the APIs introduced their own intermediate binary formats (SPIR-V, DXBC, DXIL, AIR). It&#x27;s just that not all of them are clearly specified. We should be able to convert SPIR-V to DXBC&#x2F;DXIL without going through HLSL, and the AIR limitations are up to Apple to unblock.