[austinvhuang]

I understand what you mean. We tried to make it as painless as possible by providing a downloadable prebuilt shared library so user's don't need to know the pain of building dawn from scratch. It's just a few seconds to download the first time and after that you just link instantaneously

For those that really do want to build end-to-end, there are community efforts (which I've leaned on) that make dawn builds much more palatable which I link at the bottom of the README.

We'll need to kick the tires to see if anyone reports ABI issues (I had more testing to do before announcing the project but this thread came early). I really want the Google Dawn team to ship a shared library though so we in the community don't have to roll our own.

[thrtythreeforty]

I know you said elsewhere in this thread that you want to focus on a single WebGPU runtime for the moment, but I just want to plug how easy it is to build wgpu even as a submodule of a C++ project. I had a demo integrated into my project in less than an hour of tinkering with CMake.

[austinvhuang]

Yes wgpu is a much lighter build and has a lot going for it.

The situation has gotten a lot better for both dawn and wgpu integration in C++ with:

https://github.com/eliemichel/WebGPU-distribution/

Getting a shared library build was a revelation though, credit to:

https://github.com/jspanchu/webgpu-dawn-binaries

because the FetchContent cache invalidations would still periodically lead to recompiling which gets quite annoying. When it's just a matter of linking you get few-second builds consistently. The cost is we'll have a bit of hardening around potential ABI bugs but it's ultimately worth it.

We'll work towards wgpu support. There's some sharp edges in the non-overlap w/ dawn which seem most pronounced with the async handling (which is pretty critical), but I don't think anything is a hard blocker.