Show HN: Free e-book about WebGPU Programming

This is great to see. I’ve been working on a WebGPU project for a couple months now, learning as I go, and it’s rough how many things there are that take tons of digging to find even remotely straight answers about. There’s the basic WGSL language and JS API, which are, strictly speaking, well documented, and then there’s the stuff where you have to skip past documentation and find the one post answering a tangentially related question by someone with a singleminded interest in GPU programming.

Congratulations and well done!!!

> However, I'm feeling burnt out and ready to call it finished, even though it may not feel completely done. Avoiding another abandoned side project has been my primary motivation in reaching this point.

Thank you for spending your time to produce this excellent resource and releasing it to us. Don’t feel too bad about it not being all the way where you’d like it to be. You can always improve it later, or even allow the community to help you improve it.

I haven't had time to dig into all of these demos, but the material looks _delightful_.

In case it's interesting to anyone, I did just go on a big bug-filing spree for Firefox. There are a handful of issues (that were already on the Firefox team's radar) to resolve before all of these playgrounds work as-is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=webgpu-unleashe...

This is super impressive and really exciting as I am looking to get deeper into WebGPU. Two quick notes on the playground before I dive into the content soon:

1. The playground code does not seem to fully work on Safari. The code is there and selectable but the glyphs are invisible.

EDIT: My Safari was just bugged, had to restart it and it works

2. Is the cover of the book on the right of the playground supposed to change depending on which example you are looking at? I think it could be nice if the book contents were rendered alongside the code if the user wanted instead of the cover which does not change.

WebGPU burned me out too when the Firefox developers got let go.

WebGPU is super slow on GPU and all the official benchmarks only care about CPU performance.

This is a lot of good content for putting out there for free, thank you so much.

I know a young person who was quite interested in this and looking for a resource like this.

I love the focus you've place on video, and actually making it engaging. Subject Matter Experts who undertake this are my favourite audience to be around and help.

If you might be interested in exploring this content of yours into aligned educational content and delivery including videos that could support your work financially, I'd be happy to chat an share what I do as I like magnifying subject matter experts doing things like this. All knowledge is yours, strictly to add value.

This looks fantastic.

Just the notion of a hyperlinked code-playground is fantastic. Not to mention the content of the book.

And a side project at that? Wow. Congratulations and thanks for sharing.

What's the story with WebGPU in Firefox? Why is it still not enabled by default?

Many of us are non-graphics programmers interested in learning to benefit from CUDA-style parallelization. I’ve read they’re mostly incompatible, though. I know there’s vendors supporting OpenCL and Vulkan. I didn’t see many AI projects using them, though. Makes me think cross-platform approaches aren’t great for some reason.

My questions: are there good, native implementations of WebGPU where learning it can replace learning CUDA or ROC for good, GPU utilization? If not, would a book like this teach us enough to easily pick up CUDA etc? Or are they very different to the point we’re better off learning the GPU-specific libraries?

Great book, thanks for writing it.

Just a low hanging issue. The rendering on mobile viewport especially on Firefox is not ideal. Navigation is broke and content does not scroll well.

This is very well polished! Obviously took a lot of hard work and it shows in the results. Well done!

Question: I see the that the code for the examples can be pulled from github, but I don't see anywhere to download the text of the book for offline reading??

Nice work! Thank you for sharing.

I'd like to get excited about WebGPU as well, but I am lacking enough imagination here. Games? 3D animations? What else beyond these obvious applications?

Those who are excited about it: why? what are you planning to build with it?

A rare gem of a book! I've tried using many books to get started with GPUs, but I always ended up giving up quickly. This book is the most in-depth yet easy-to-understand one I've ever come across.

This is awesome! I’ve given up learning graphics programming in the past due to the fragmented ecosystem of libraries. It just felt overwhelming. This seems exactly what I’ve been missing.

Nice. I was just about to embark on a small game prototype in WebGPU to learn it.

I'm going to start by rampaging through this book.

It looks quite nice, great efforts.

Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks

This looks great. I can't wait to dive in. Thank you very much for sharing.

Formatting nitpick for the site: when viewed on mobile, the text width is set to screen width minus 1 margin, but the page is fixed at text width plus both margins, so the scrolling has a lot of sloppy side-to-side play and it's irritating to get the content lined up in the middle.