I want to talk about WebGPU
I suspect this article may even be underestimating the impact of WebGPU. I'll make two observations.<p>First, for AI and machine learning type workloads, the infrastructure situation is a big mess right now unless you buy into the Nvidia / CUDA ecosystem. If you're a research, you pretty much have to, but increasingly people will just want to run models that have already been trained. Fairly soon, WebGPU will be an alternative that more or less Just Works, although I do expect things to be rough in the early days. There's also a performance gap, but I can see it closing.<p>Second, for compute shaders in general (potentially accelerating a large variety of tasks), the barrier to entry falls dramatically. That's especially true on web deployments, where running your own compute shader costs somewhere around 100 lines of code. But it becomes practical on native too, especially Rust where you can just pull in a wgpu dependency.<p>As for text being one of the missing pieces, I'm hoping Vello and supporting infrastructure will become one of the things people routinely reach for. That'll get you not just text but nice 2D vector graphics with fills, strokes, gradients, blend modes, and so on. It's not production-ready yet, but I'm excited about the roadmap.<p>[Note: very lightly adapted from a comment at cohost; one interesting response was by Tom Forsyth, suggesting I look into SYCL]