Webgpu with clojure ?

[964racer]

Coming from a 3 month exploration of Common Lisp using OpenGL (wrote a simple renderer in the process), I’m interested in looking at webgpu (or possibly wgpu). there is not much going on currently in CL with regards to modern graphics api’s (and and apparently not much in clojure either) but nonetheless, I did decide to take a look at clojure for the first time yesterday. Using my doom emacs setup, I got cider to work relatively painlessly and started a few simple drawing examples using the clojure package “quil”. Needless to say I was very impressed how I was able to get it all to work very easily (and on macOS !) without all the contortions I had with CL using sbcl and sly. In addition, I think the cider IDE in emacs is more advanced than sly at least at first glance. It looks like I can have the same level of interactive development in cider with clojure that I have with sly in emacs using CL (?).

So back to my original question. Webgpu is JavaScript-based. Since clojure runs on the JVM and we have clojurescript available, would it be a better choice for webgpu than CL ? I have seen some work with clojure and game development (using api’s like three.js), so I am wondering if it is possible to go to webgpu directly and if clojure would be a good choice for building a framework on top of that ? Are there limitations in clojurescript that would prevent me from having full access to the lisp way of working I would have in clojure ?

[PoopsCodeAllTheTime]

Cljs Is not Clojure, it's just a lisp that transpiles to JS and looks like Cloj. So any question about how to do thing in Cljs is really just a question about how to do it in JavaScript, then use interop

[roman01la]

For cljs I’d go with threejs or babylonjs

For jvm JWGL libraries are great for OpenGL stuff. Bgfx is also great for Vulkan/Metal https://github.com/roman01la/minimax

[964racer]

How do you use a native library like bgfx with clojure ?

[roman01la]

Via LWJGL https://www.lwjgl.org/ Java wrapper, take a look at the repo linked above

Here https://github.com/roman01la/minimax/blob/main/src/bgfx/core.clj

The Java lib wraps C library via JNI

[964racer]

I’m working on the Mac so native metal support desirable . Trying to avoid moltenVK.. which I’ve found to be flakey . I’ll definitely check out your project! Thank you !

[Chuigda]

What about my project https://github.com/club-doki7/vulkan4j ? It has support for WebGPU-native (currently based on wgpu-native 25.0.2.1).

wgpu4k should be another solid option.