The next step in what, exactly? The major thing I see GPGPU being used for on the Web is to mine cryptocurrency using your viewers' hardware in lieu of (or, more likely, as a supplement to) ads.
A lot of modern 3D engine use compute shader to do a lot of different things.
For example, I use it to process millions of particles, which wouldn't be possible without it.
I hope not. The proposed standard was not even remotely vendor-neutral.
I would love to have compute shaders in WebGL. All it would require is bumping the OpenGL version that WebGL is based on from ES 3.0 to ES 3.1 in the next revision.
As far as I can tell, that will not happen because it would reduce the need for the WebGPU proposal. Needless to say, I find the situation very annoying.
> I hope not. The proposed standard was not even remotely vendor-neutral.
Why not? WebGPU work continues here, based on the work that Apple proposed. Google has a cross-platform prototype implementation. https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb
> I would love to have compute shaders in WebGL. All it would require is bumping the OpenGL version that WebGL is based on from ES 3.0 to ES 3.1 in the next revision.
WebGL2 has very little vendor support already, and OpenGL is a dead end, from an API perspective. Something low-ish like Metal without being as absurd as Vulkan would be a great fit for the web.
There's room to develop a new API that's a lot better than WebGL. I just don't think we'll get the best result from a standards process driven by realpolitik.
I would think you can achieve similar speed using WebGL in the browser and then have all the comfortable functionality of the browser for free.