> The relationship between wgpu and WebGPU is that they're basically made by the same people, and in Firefox WebGPU is implemented on top of wgpu.
I think that’s understating the relationship a bit. The wgpu API follows the WebGPU spec quite closely. It’s like saying “taffy isn’t flexbox”. You can make a technical argument that it’s not identical, and to be flexbox it must be in a browser, but anyone working with taffy will recognize that it’s implementing flexbox and will find that all their understands of flexbox apply to taffy.
Similarly, most of what I’m learning working with wgpu (outside of, maybe, threading), is directly transferable to WebGPU. And vice versa.
That's fair, my comment did understate their relation quite a lot. They are very closely linked, to the point stuff has been added to the WebGPU spec pretty-much because "eh, it's already in wgpu".
But the "knowledge is transferable to WebGPU" is key. Even when you're compiling your wgpu code to WASM, you're not using WebGPU directly - for every API call, you're going through generated bindings on the Rust side and then generated bindings on the JS side where the actual call is made. The JS wrappers aren't trivial either - Rust structs need to be converted to the nested JS objects required by WebGPU spec, numeric enums need to be converted strings, etc.
Considering that WebGPU is supposed to be the low-level graphics API for the Web, DX12/VK/Metal equivalent, all this is at least worth a mention, and "wgpu == WebGPU" brushes over a all that, to the point where we're now casually throwing statements like "[WebGPU] is guaranteed to run anywhere, including the browser".
I think that’s understating the relationship a bit. The wgpu API follows the WebGPU spec quite closely. It’s like saying “taffy isn’t flexbox”. You can make a technical argument that it’s not identical, and to be flexbox it must be in a browser, but anyone working with taffy will recognize that it’s implementing flexbox and will find that all their understands of flexbox apply to taffy.
Similarly, most of what I’m learning working with wgpu (outside of, maybe, threading), is directly transferable to WebGPU. And vice versa.