The graphics stack continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in portability. One day I realized that WebAssembly (Wasm) actually held the solution to the madness. It’s runnable anywhere, embeddable into anything, and performant enough for real-time graphics. So I quit my job and dove into the adventure of creating a portable, embeddable WASM-based graphics framework from the ground up: high-level enough for app developers to easily make whatever graphics they want, and low-level enough to take full advantage of the GPU and everything else needed for a high-performance application.
I call it Renderlet to emphasize the embeddable aspect — you can make self-contained graphics modules that do just what you want, connect them together, and make them run on anything or in anything with trivial interop.
If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.
Somewhere along the way I got into YC as a solo founder (!) but mostly I’ve been heads-down building this thing for the last 6 months. It’s not quite ready for an open alpha release, but it’s close—close enough that I’m ready to write about it, show it off, and start getting feedback. This is the thing I dreamed of as an application developer, and I want to know what you think!
When Rive open-sourced their 2D vector engine and made a splash on HN a couple weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39766893), I was intrigued. Rive’s renderer is built as a higher-level 2D API similar to SVG, whereas the Wander renderer (the open-source runtime part of Renderlet) exposes a lower-level 3D API over the GPU. Could Renderlet use its GPU backend to run the Rive Renderer library, enabling any 3D app to have a 2D vector backend? Yes it can - I implemented it!
You can see it working here: https://vimeo.com/929416955 and there’s a deep technical dive here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander/wiki/Using-renderlet-wit.... The code for my runtime Wasm Renderer (a.k.a. Wander) is here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander.
I’ll come back and do a proper Show HN or Launch HN when the compiler is ready for anyone to use and I have the integration working on all platforms, but I hope this is interesting enough to take a look at now. I want to hear what you think of this!
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...
Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.
I think the ideal in that article is that people can write components in whatever languages they want, and when they compile to WASM, they can all interoperate. It reminds me of all of those compile-to-Javascript languages for writing micro-frontends, although there is not as much interoperability from a React boundary to say, a ClojureScript boundary.
By the way, what are you building as a solo founder for YC? Is it related to this project? For this project, I'm curious to see how exactly WASM interoperates with the GPU directly, bypassing the platform specific APIs. Do you still have to write GPU-specific parts for each of the GPU manufacturers? I wonder if there would be an open standard called WASM-GPU in the future that abstracts over these but doesn't necessarily touch any of the OS directly.
To me, this reads like the intersection of "Web Components as Wasm" and "The Browser as an OS" - almost something analogous to WASI as browser APIs that are delivered via Wasm ABI instead of JS/WebIDL. It's an interesting take, and as long as it can operate alongside existing code, I'm all for that.
There are strong parallels to what we're building - small modules of Wasm graphics code that can interoperate across a common interface.
Check the repo for the GPU integration - it's like a super trimmed down version of wgpu, where graphics data is copied out of Wasm linear memory and a host specific API (WebGPU/OpenGL/DirectX) takes care of the upload to the GPU. There is a wasi-webgpu WebAssembly L1 proposal that I am involved with in the works, driven by Mendy Berger, and at some point all of this will be tooled on top of that with wgpu as a backend.
For renderlet the company, the goal is to build developer tools that make it easy to build renderlets and these kinds of applications without having to write raw Wasm code. The meta-compiler in the video is the first step in that direction! The runtime itself will always be open-source.
"More than 20 programming tools vendors offer some 26 programming languages — including C++, Perl, Python, Java, COBOL, RPG and Haskell — on .NET."
https://news.microsoft.com/2001/10/22/massive-industry-and-d...
"The EM intermediate language is a family of intermediate languages created to facilitate the production of portable compilers."
"EM is a real programming language and could be implemented in hardware; a number of the language front-ends have libraries implemented in EM assembly language.", namely C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EM_intermediate_language
"The high-level instruction set (called TIMI for "Technology Independent Machine Interface" by IBM), allows application programs to take advantage of advances in hardware and software without recompilation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AS/400#Technology_Independ...
WASM is just another take on this.