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Why Deprecation?

Open loretoparisi opened this issue 2 years ago • 7 comments

Why this project has been deprecated? The raise of recent advancements of browser WebGPU and neural network Chat LLM models, could be a motivation to resurrect this amazing project! Also mentioned in https://github.com/orgs/nodejs/discussions/41994

loretoparisi avatar May 25 '23 22:05 loretoparisi

The project was deprecated in favor of the chromium's team effort to create official node bindings. Also at some point this project only acted as sort of a playground for experimental extensions such as this one and was no longer really meant to be used for real projects anymore.

However I think having access to the GPU in node would be a huge win as it opens the door to so many new things. I'd be happy to maintain this project again, but unfortunately currently lack time to do so.

maierfelix avatar May 26 '23 08:05 maierfelix

The project was deprecated in favor of the chromium's team effort to create official node bindings. Also at some point this project only acted as sort of a playground for experimental extensions such as this one and was no longer really meant to be used for real projects anymore.

However I think having access to the GPU in node would be a huge win as it opens the door to so many new things.

I'd be happy to maintain this project again, but unfortunately currently lack time to do so.

Thank you! It seems the Node team was interested to cross platform WebGPU builds, maybe yours (linux) it could be a simpler starting point, rather than reinventing the wheel, maybe the Dawn node team will simplify or starting to release stable dawn.node modules!

loretoparisi avatar May 26 '23 08:05 loretoparisi

I don't know the state of the official node bindings, but there was a discussion before to move the webgpu npm package over to the dawn team and let them continue support on it. Their node bindings use NAPI so I guess it should be cross platform already. Maybe @Kangz can give a comment on that?

maierfelix avatar May 26 '23 09:05 maierfelix

The dawn.node bindings in the Dawn repo are indeed cross platform. I've used them on macOS and Linux, and they should work on Windows too. They aren't exactly production quality yet, but close to. They run the vast majority of the WebGPU test suite successfully. Now that WebGPU v1 is released in Chromium we're looking at making parts of the ecosystem better. A part of that would be making it easier to use dawn.node by releasing it on npm etc. But we need to set up infra to do that and nobody spent the time on it yet.

Kangz avatar May 26 '23 09:05 Kangz