Yeah, I know it's just a file format for scene description.

I still believe rendering would work better for the industry as a whole if they could agree to all support, say, Vulkan.

I doubt it'll ever happen, but a consistent graphics driver/API standard across operating systems would be pretty rad.

While not at the kernel level I think WebGPU is probably better than something like Vulkan for that "I can target this low level access to the GPU resources but expect it to work everywhere" use case. Ignoring the name hint that it was designed for the web (it works fine outside the browser), it's a lot more portable than Vulkan across its various implementations precisely because it needed to work on various devices that could browse the web. It's also already backed and supported by all the big players, including Apple.

Out of idle curiosity I thought I'd give it a try. Maybe run a demo on the REPL in Clojure. I try to Google "Java WebGPU" and I get no real results

I could be wrong but It seems it's technically possible to use it outside the web, but the ecosystem looks halfbaked

WebGPU, unsurprisingly, is much better supported by the web ecosystem right now (just like WASM in the beginning), so you'd have better luck trying to use ClojureScript (as then you can just use the JS interop) for playing around with it. https://codelabs.developers.google.com/your-first-webgpu-app would be easy to get started with and translated to ClojureScript cleanly without issues.

Also, keep in mind that WebGPU only been around since 2021, and wasn't actually enabled in Chrome until this (2023) spring, so it's relatively new tech, not surprising that the ecosystem still feels halfbaked.

I'm a big fan of webGPU. I use it within my Three.js projects. Really happy to see it gaining support worldwide. I hope either it or similar projects continue to gain traction!