These weeks in WebGPU/Dawn (9)

[Corentin Wallez]

Here's what happened the last two weeks (2019-01-14 to 2019-01-28)

Standardization front:

• Much progress at the San Diego F2F meeting
• Discussions around the "WebGPU programming model" that needs to be defined for both SPIR-V and WHLSL.
• Reached consensus on the approach for compressed textures.
• Agreed on the IDL related to swapchain creation.
• Agreed to pursue mapAsync (before snapshot) plus buffer sub ranges (post snapshot) for buffer mapping.
• The WebGPU API is now the GPU API for the Web and objects are prefixed with "GPU". Colloquially the API is still WebGPU though.
• Google made a tracker for all the changes pre-snapshot to the IDL.

Coding front for Dawn and WebGPU in Chromium:

• Austin started refactoring dawn_wire to make it maintainable and extensible.
• Yunchao added support for const*const* annotations types.
• Austin is looking at the integration of dawn_wire in Chromium.
• Corentin has WIP to implement adapters on all backends.

Infra front:

• Kai presented the CTS harness experiment and got positive feedback. 

Others:

• The port of the Aquarium on Dawn, works on all Dawn backends!