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!
How did you overcome the shared array buffer accessibility problem on safari vs access to ad networks which is important for online games?
I called it single threads vs regular builds.
Hope to help make sure there's a diverse set of rendering kernels for everyone.
Edited: Link to our work at making portable 3d graphics on the web with an editor. https://editor.godotengine.org/releases/latest/
WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.
Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.
That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.
EDIT: As a concrete example of the type of problem's WASM for games face, see this issue we discovered (can't unload memory after you've loaded it, meaning you can never save memory by dropping the asset data after uploading assets to the GPU, unless you load your assets in a very specific, otherwise suboptimal sequence): https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/12057#issuecomment...
(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)
I agree that the feature set around WebGPU is constrained and becoming outdated tech compared to native platforms. It shouldn't have taken this long just to get compute shaders into a browser, but here we are. The lack of programmable mesh pipelines is a barrier for a lot of games, and I know that's just the beginning.
For memory, architecturally, that's why I'm treating wander as a tree of nodes, each containing Wasm functions - everything gets its own stack, and there is a strategy to manage Store sizes in wasmtime. Deleting that is the only way to free memory vs a singular application compiled to Wasm with one stack/heap/etc. More of a data-driven visualization framework than a full engine like Bevy, which I still think is one of the most elegant ways to build browser based games and 3d environments.
https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader/issues...
https://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/public_web...