Comment by donatj
4 years ago
Honestly I think your examples are both genuinely less comprehendible to someone without a deep understanding of GL going in than my example.
It’s a very bad, non-object oriented API in an object oriented language. It was designed for and by people who know GL in other C like languages, not for people who know JavaScript. It is unlike any other part of the language.
The fact that I have to write a shader myself, as a fricken string like I’m writing SQL over here, just to draw a triangle is absurd. There should at the very least be some sort of provided builder for simple shaders.
Yeah, they probably are, I didn't intend them as tutorials but as a better representation of the actual scutwork necessary to draw a triangle.
Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/trama. If you want to run them on the GPU you need a language that exposes the GPU's capabilities.
In essence your primary complaint is that the GPU instruction set is not object-oriented (and neither is your database). Well, you can design your own GPU, but I've got some bad news for you about Verilog, Chisel, and BlueSpec! And you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented, so your OO GPU will end up underperforming, like the Burroughs B5000 and the Symbolics 3600 (hopefully not as badly as the Intel iAPX432). You'll probably have more success writing an object-oriented database.
However, I do agree that WebGL is a bad API, because boilerplate is never acceptable.
> you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented
I am saving this quote for future use. Thank you :)
Funny, I would argue that the rock on my table is very definitely an object ;)
4 replies →
I don’t see how someone not understanding GL first can do anything useful with it. Like, what would such people even use it for? If they need a complete solution just use a plugin that displays some rotatable 3D model. But I really don’t see the value of planning for the lowest common denominator in case of a highly specialized domain specific API.