is webGPU actually web-specific somehow?

[LastExceed]

I'm at the very start of learning how to interact with a GPU, so i currently know next to nothing. While searching for a starting point i came across this crate. the name "webGPU" and its history strongly suggest that this is for web applications, but looking into the documentation it seems like web is nothing more than another possible platform to target, and working with wgpu doesn't necessarily involve any webdev at all. I wondering, is this some web thing ported to desktop (with corresponding overhead, like electron disguising a browser as a native desktop app), or is it platform native by design with just a misleading name? would it be a misuse to choose this crate when not targeting web at all?

sorry if my question is lacking a bit of structure, asking clear isolated questions is difficult with this little knowledge

[Ciubix8513]

Well wgpu is a sort of small abstraction layer on top of native graphics api, which include WebGPU, so no it's not just a web thing or like electron. But i think it does has a small overhead compared to interacting with a native api, but that overhead is practically insignificant. And no it's not a misuse of the crate to use outside of web, Veloren uses wgpu, Bevy uses wgpu, Iced uses wgpu, and a lot of other projects

[Ciubix8513]

Yes

[LastExceed]

then can you explain what this sentence from the readme means?

The api is based on the WebGPU standard. It serves as the core of the WebGPU integration in Firefox, Servo, and Deno.

[Ciubix8513]

well, it's just that you use wgpu by writing code the way you would with WebGPU, and it then translated into other graphics apis

[LastExceed]

oh so it just used webGPU as a design guideline and is otherwise not specific to it any more than other APIs ?

[Ciubix8513]

Yea

[kpreid]

WebGPU has these requirements in order to serve its goals:

• It must be impossible to use the API such that it causes memory corruption or can read data the application did not have access to — it must be memory safe.
• it must be implementable on top of common GPU driver APIs.

Conveniently, both of these things also make the WebGPU API design a good API design for a Rust GPU abstraction layer. Thus, wgpu is a useful Rust library.

And, in addition to its use in Rust applications, parts of wgpu are used to implement WebGPU in Firefox, since wgpu has got the abstraction layer even if it doesn't have a JavaScript front end — you don't need to care about this, but it explains why wgpu is not just "inspired by" WebGPU but takes care to be conformant to the standard itself. (So if you write a Rust application with wgpu, and compile it to WebAssembly and run it in Firefox, you could be running wgpu on top of wgpu!)