[grovesNL]

SPIR-V was never in the specification, but both wgpu and Dawn used SPIR-V in the meantime until a shading language decision was made.

[HexDecOctBin]

Sure, but that proves my point. They took so long to decide upon the shading language that implementations had to erect a separate scaffolding just to be able to test things out.

[grovesNL]

Scaffolding wasn’t a problem at all. Both used SPIRV-Cross for shader conversions at the time and focused on implementing the rest of the API. The shading language barely matters to the rest of the implementation. You can still use SPIR-V with wgpu on its Vulkan backend today for example.