As someone who has done this since DX7, what you’re looking for is WebGPU either Dawn (Google) or wgpu-native (Firefox). WebGPU works. It’s 99% there across platforms for use.
There’s another wrapper abstraction we all love and use called BGFX that is nice to work with. Slightly higher level than Vulkan or Metal but lower than OpenGL. Works on everything, consoles, fridges, phones, cars, desktops, digital signage.
My own engines have jumped back and forth between WebGPU and BGFX for the last few years.
Personally I'm not interested in the web as a platform. The APIs themselves I'm interested in, but as a target I think the web needs to die for everything that isn't a document.
I never mentioned the web as a target, rather devices. You don’t need a browser, you need a window or a surface to draw on and use C/C++/Rust/C# to write your code.
WebGPU is a standard, not necessarily for the web alone.
At no point does a browser ever enter the picture.
Well, it started off with “all the right intentions” of providing low-level access to the GPU for browsers to expose as an alternative to WebGL (and OpenGL ES like API’s of old).
However, throw a bunch of engineers in a room…
When wgpu got mature enough, they needed a way to expose the rust API for other needs. The C wrapper came. Then for testing and other needs, wgpu-native. I’m not a member of either team so I can’t say why for sure but because of those decisions, we have this powerful abstraction available pretty much on anything that can draw a web page. And since it’s just exposing the buffers and things that Vulkan, Metal, etc are already based on, it’s damned fast.
The added benefit is you get WGSL as your shading language which can translate into any and all the others.
The downsides are it provides NO WINDOW support as that needs to be provided by the platform, i.e. you. Good news is the tests and stuff use glfw and it’s the same setup to get Vulkan working as it is to get WebGPU working. Make window, probe it, make surface/swap chain, start your threads.
The WebGPU spec identifies squarely as a web standard: "WebGPU is an API that exposes the capabilities of GPU hardware for the Web." There are also no mentions of non-web applications.
The It's true that you can use Dawn and wgpu from native code but that's all outside the spec.
The intent and the application are never squarely joined. Yes it’s made for the web. However, it’s an API for graphics. If you need graphics, and you want to run anywhere that a web page could run, it’s a great choice.
If you want to roll your own abstraction over Vulkan, Metal, DX12, Legacy OpenGL, Legacy DX11, Mesa - be my guest.
You mentioned "Google" and Firefox, one of which is a browser. I clarified that I'm not interested in the web as a target, not to dismiss your entire suggestion but rather to clarify that that particular part doesn't interest me.
There’s another wrapper abstraction we all love and use called BGFX that is nice to work with. Slightly higher level than Vulkan or Metal but lower than OpenGL. Works on everything, consoles, fridges, phones, cars, desktops, digital signage.
My own engines have jumped back and forth between WebGPU and BGFX for the last few years.