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kvark's dev blog
Personal blog · kvark.github.io · on HN as kvarkprogrammingwebai
kvark's dev blog is a personal blog at kvark.github.io about programming, web and ai. Since 2016, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Horrors of SPIR-V”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link kvark's posts as the main reference in the SPIR-V versus WGSL debate around WebGPU, especially the 'SPIR-V horrors' article on why SPIR-V is hard to use as a web shader format.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The history of kvark's ideas and hacking experiments.
Most-linked posts?
- Horrors of SPIR-V5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-05-18
- /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-05-18
- Point of WebGPU on Native3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-05-03
- Wgpu API Tracing Infrastructure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-19
- Implementing WebGPU in Gecko2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-20
- Reconstructed debate about accepting SPIR-V in WebGPU2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-30
- Missing Structure in Technical Discussions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-30
What Hacker News says?
You may want to read this summary of the arguments pro and con SPIR-V, made by Kvark a gfx engineer at Mozilla, so you have a more balanced view of the topic : The summary exists in two variants: a graphic summary[1] and a textual one[2]. [1] https://kvark.github.io/webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.component.html [2] https://kvark.github.io/webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.html
Comment linking /webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.html
on “M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU”Submitted NixOS on Framework Laptop as a story · 358 points
HN discussionThe author list and W3C document are pretty much irrelevant, the actual working group is what counts. After thinking about it some more, I've come to the conclusion that I've actually not been strong enough in my initial accusation, and that Apple is trying to smother any threat that WebGPU poses to its native App supremacy. The story is essentially: Apple wants SPIRV dead. Mozilla wants SPIRV alive. Google wants SP…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “WebGPU – All of the cores, none of the canvas”Submitted Point of WebGPU on Native as a story · 177 points
HN discussion> Are you saying that the direct mapping requirements I quoted above have been abandoned? Yes. See these quotes: Apple: "Having an isolated focus on SPIR-V is not a good perspective, we have MSL etc. to consider too" ... Apple: "Extreme A is no interaction with SPIRV?, extreme B is very tightly coupled to SPIRV, we should find a middle point" ... Google: "We take all targets into consideration. We can allow develope…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “WebAssembly: The New Kubernetes?”Submitted Missing Structure in Technical Discussions as a story · 161 points
HN discussionTime will tell if this API is usable. In particular, the way resource synchronization works, and object renaming. Time will tell if it will perform better than WebGPU or other abstractions. Time will tell if it remains small in the presence of driver bugs that need working around… I’m also sceptical about their new bytecode for a shading language. Parsing shaders at runtime was not a concern with WebGPU - it’s very…
Comment linking /naga/shader/2022/02/17/shader-translation-benchmark.html
on “SDL3 new GPU API merged”Submitted Feasibility of low-level GPU access on the Web as a story · 128 points
HN discussionWhat he wrote was not just a devils advocate position. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Also his 'Horrors of SPIR-V' article a year later[0] which has this conclusion: > I had a chance to work with SPIR-V rather intimately, and I’m becoming convinced that most of the defenders of this format (who like to criticize WGSL in turn) have little experience actually doing anything with it [...] I was one of them. S…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “WebGPU now available for testing in Safari Technology Preview”Submitted Implementing WebGPU in Gecko as a story · 116 points
HN discussionI very much share this concern, wrote about this semi-recently in http://kvark.github.io/web/platform/2020/09/30/platform-wars...
Comment linking /web/platform/2020/09/30/platform-wars.html
on “First Public Working Drafts: WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language”Submitted Implementing WebGPU in Gecko as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Google and Mozilla are also developing a C-compatible library that should be available as an OpenGL alternative for native code. To clarify, Google and Mozilla are both developing separate libraries: Dawn (in C++) and wgpu (in Rust) respectively. Both are designed to be usable behind the same native C API - https://github.com/webgpu-native/webgpu-headers > For the shading language they settled on a text based lang…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “First Public Working Drafts: WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language”Submitted Point of WebGPU on Native as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWebGPU on native is the best bet to bring back the times where you could reasonably write once and run everywhere. See also - http://kvark.github.io/web/gpu/native/2020/05/03/point-of-we...
Comment linking /web/gpu/native/2020/05/03/point-of-webgpu-native.html
on “First Public Working Drafts: WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language”Submitted Defining the Web platform in the context of 3D API as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is still in transition, and the full story is complicated. The official shader language for WebGPU is WGSL, and that will almost certainly be the only language supported for web deployment. Originally this was going to be a textual representation that had exactly the same semantics ("bijective") as SPIR-V, but that's been diverging a bit[1]. Only very recently have atomics been added to the spec, and implementa…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “First Public Working Drafts: WebGPU and WebGPU Shading Language”Submitted Horrors of SPIR-V as a story · 3 points
HN discussionApparently wgsl was created because SPIR-V isn't well suited for being an intermediate representation to target graphics APIs other than Vulkan itself. Some notes of intrest: https://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “RenderingNG: An architecture that makes and keeps Chrome fast for the long term”Submitted Wgpu API Tracing Infrastructure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRight, SPIRV is a good format as the destination of your shader pipeline. But it can only be that on Vulkan. With other backends, SPIRV doesn’t help, and instead stands in the way. https://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “Ask HN: Will there ever be a vendor agnostic GPU interface?”Submitted Shader Translation Benchmark as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> What guarantees do you have it won't happen again? Apple was pretty clear about their intent not to ship WebGL2, and they did the opposite for WebGPU so it's not gonna be the same story. Of course, I can't be 100% sure that Apple won't change their mind (like they eventually did for WebGL2) or anything, but there is no reason to believe they'll do so. > Even if Apple had done it on time, it was a 2012 hardware API…
Comment linking /webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.component.html
on “Porting WebGL Shaders to WebGPU”Submitted Problems with Decision Making at W3C as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFaith Ekstrand has an impressive track record of compiler work and has written a few blog posts[1], [1a]. Her Mastodon[2] is also worth a follow. SPIR-V is important in the compute shader space, especially because DXIL and Metal's AIR are similar. I'm going to link three articles critical of SPIR-V: [3], [4], [5]. WebGPU [6] is interesting for a number of reasons, largely because they're trying to actually nail down…
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “Ask HN: Resources for GPU Compilers?”Submitted Tale of Alignment with Vulkan as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBack when I worked on WebGPU in Firefox, GPU debugging was pretty straightforward. You’d use a setting that enables API traces of WebGPU, give it a path, and it would produce a trace. Then you’d replay it in a standalone application that is easily ran from NSight/RenderDoc/PIX/whatever. Moreover, you could replay it on a different platform with a different API! It was a breeze. I bet it still works. http://kvark.git…
Comment linking /wgpu/debug/test/ron/2020/07/18/wgpu-api-tracing.html
on “GPU profiling for WebGPU workloads on Windows with Chrome”Submitted Who is going to validate the validator? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I don't understand why WebGPU does not accept pre-compiled shaders. See here for one 'technical pov' from somebody who was involved: https://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
Comment linking /spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html
on “WebGPU and the Price of Compiling WGSL”Submitted Point of WebGPU on Native as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
