WebGPU Headers

This repository contains C headers equivalent to the WebGPU API and documentation on the native specificities of the headers.

This header is NOT STABLE yet, and the documentation is very much a work in progress!

All of the API is defined in the webgpu.h header file. Read the documentation here!

Why?

While WebGPU is a JavaScript API made for the Web, it is a good tradeoff of ergonomic, efficient and portable graphics API. Almost all of its concepts are not specific to the Web platform and the headers replicate them exactly, while adding capabilities to interact with native concepts (like windows).

Implementations of this header include:

• Dawn, the C++ WebGPU implementation used in Chromium
• wgpu-native, C bindings to wgpu, the Rust WebGPU implementation used in Firefox
• Emscripten translates webgpu.h calls to JavaScript WebGPU calls when compiling to WASM

Details

Here are some details about the structure of this repository.

Main files

• webgpu.h is the one and only header file that defines the WebGPU C API. Only this needs to be integrated in a C project that links against a WebGPU implementation.

• webgpu.yml is the main machine-readable source of truth for the C API and its documentation (in YAML format). It is used to generate the official webgpu.h header present in this repository, (will be used) to generate the official documentation, and may be used by any other third party to design tools and wrappers around WebGPU-Native.

• schema.json is the JSON schema that formally specifies the structure of webgpu.yml.

Generator

• Makefile defines the rules to automatically generate webgpu.h from webgpu.yml and check the result.

• gen/ and the go.* files are the source code of the generator called by the Makefile.

• tests/compile is used to check that the generated C header is indeed valid C/C++ code.

Workflows

• .github/workflows defines the automated processes that run upon new commits/PR, to check that changes in webgpu.yml and webgpu.h are consistent.

Contributing

Important When submitting a change, one must modify both the webgpu.yml and webgpu.h files in a consistent way. One should first edit webgpu.yml (the source of truth), then run make gen to update webgpu.h and finally commit both changes together.