Deno 1.39: The Return of WebGPU

Now all that's left to do is to integrate a minimal native system glue library into Deno (create a window with a WebGPU canvas, receive input events, audio buffer streaming) and it would be a nice little platform to build and distribute small games and graphics demos written in WebAssembly and/or Typescript :)

This is exciting<p>&gt; <i>The WebGPU API gives developers a low level, high performance, cross architecture way to program GPU hardware from JavaScript. It is the effective successor to WebGL on the Web. The spec has been finalized and Chrome has already shipped the API. Support is underway in Firefox and Safari.</i><p>Interestingly, the Deno team previously attempted[0] this and rolled it back due to instability. Once this is stable, it means that ML&#x2F;AI workloads will be accessible to JS developers:<p>&gt; <i>These days, most neural networks are defined in Python with the computation offloaded to GPUs. We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed. Providing WebGPU support out-of-the-box in Deno is a step in this direction. Our goal is to run Tensorflow.js on Deno, with GPU acceleration. We expect this to be achieved in the coming weeks or months.</i><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deno.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;v1.8#experimental-support-for-the-webgpu-api" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deno.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;v1.8#experimental-support-for-the-webg...</a>

I&#x27;ve been wondering for a long time when we might expect to see a stable WebGPU API in all major browsers (mostly concerned with my daily browser, Firefox), so I&#x27;ve been looking for an official message on the topic. Deno claims the spec is ready<p>&gt; The [WebGPU] spec has been finalized<p>but the official WebGPU spec [1] still describes it as a draft. Have I misinterpreted something here or is there some missing context around Deno&#x27;s statement?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;webgpu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;webgpu&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m still so bullish on Deno. They iterate quickly, but they also have a clear vision and direction. I&#x27;ve almost completely stopped using Node on personal projects; Deno is the new world I want for non-browser JavaScript.<p>Recent example: I&#x27;ve got a Deno server running a production service. I needed to make some bulk changes in the DB, and I was able to <i>import DB types and utils directly from the main server project</i> and quickly write a TypeScript script that used them to make the changes I needed, with the new script being the entrypoint, no config changes made, and the rest of the project being ignored. This would be practically impossible in a Node.js project that used any TypeScript, ES modules, etc.

I gotta admit at the outset I was more than a little sceptical of WebGPU for ML in general but now I have much greater respect for the usefulness of local inference as part of a webapp and the increasing ability to actually run a quantized models in the browser. Glad I was wrong !

&gt; WebGPU is still considered unstable in Deno. To access it in Deno use the --unstable-webgpu flag