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  • Hacker News
  • Looks interesting but none of the examples worked on the latest iOS safari
    by shevis
  • They all worked for me in iOS safari..
    by k33n
  • I'm sorry they aren't working for you :(

    I am running ios 26.6 in iphone mini. Do you know the version and device model where they are failing for you? (in Settings -> General -> Info)

    by hugodan
  • I am a big Lisper. You lost me at the triple quote.
    by SomeHacker44
  • The triple quote screams scrambled eggs with bacon.
    by larodi
  • Needs a Lisp Shading Language.
    by lrasinen
  • hey! indeed, it is a pattern more from Python/Kotlin/etc and on first sight it looks awful for those used to work in more lispy ways.

    pngine is using a data language I made for fun with s-expressions and appropriately named "SJON". It is a data language (kinda like EDN, or er.. JSON) to declare things, not to run/interpret things, it has no reader macros, no quote/unquote, no eval, no cons or car/cdr or..., the only thing similar to Lisp is really the surface look, and on the surface triple quotes really feel like they don't belong in there.

    But I need to paste WGSL into a config file and WGSL can be full of " and \, and I have no reader to extend.

    In a way I'm glad you didn't spend a lot of time and got lost at the start ahah because if the triple quote bothered you the rest would too.

    For instance, in SJON strings don't remember their quotes:

      (= """hello""" "hello")     ; true
  (= "a\nb" """a
  b""")                       ; true, escapes resolve before comparison
    It is a data language, and one thing I wanted was for numbers to carry their units:

      (camera :ortho :zoom 2 :fov 90deg :shutter 250ms :scale 50%)
  ; unit is a suffix glued to a number with no space
  ; oh! and dates and times are also token kinds: 2026-05-19 and 23:59:59.999 lex as values
  ; these don't get interpreted, just carried over and then the schema decides what is valid
    yeah... there is a schema, which is written in SJON too, that is validated ahead of evaluation, and docs have a binary IR, so a tiny runtime can consume one without carrying a parser.

    For instance, the SJON schema for the WebGPU spec was sketched from the spec API.

    Sorry for the long answer, yeah, it is not Lisp, just S-expressions to leverage a small part of their amazing versatility.

    by hugodan
  • You can try to make the WebGPU API more declarative, but the issue that you still run into is that individual draw calls and passes are a poor abstraction level to express modern rendering in.

    To reach the quality of a modern PBR renderer with shadows, SSAO, temporal denoising and the like, you need to lower one conceptual draw into multiple concrete draws, sequenced in a particular way, to their own targets, and I haven't seen a lot of success in this space because the shaders need to become polymorphic.

    by unconed
  • Hi unconed!

    these are very good points, with my attempt the only run-time polymorphism is a switch inside a shader. Maybe we can exploit the pipeline constants and then branch on them, still feels like a hack, but could work for a poor man approach.

    I have never done advanced/modern rendering things, just 2D/vector/sdfs and hacks, but your comment is food for thought, in that in this level of abstraction these are somewhat open problems.

    by hugodan