week 31, year 2024 - webgpu and parsers

02 August 2024

Updated: 23 December 2025

welcome

since this is my first post in this format i figured i should just say hey! this series will be a bit of a braindump for project updates and links to things i found this week

what i’m working on

right now i’m the concept of a photo editing app that uses shaders for applying image effects, the initial concept seems to be promising but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before i can have anything even remotely usable

i also had an excuse to use git bisect in a new and interesting way and made some additions to my git notes about using the —first-parent and replay functionality

what i found

ts-parsec

i’ve been pretty invested in parser combinators recently and have been playing around with the ts-parsec library and it’s been a pretty fun time. for a general idea of what these things are all about you can take a look at my blog post on parser combinators

WebGPU

webgpu is the “new” way to create shaders on the web and comes with a new javsacript API and a new language called wgsl

the api is a bit more complex than the one for webgl but still reasonably manageable if you take a read through the webgpu fundamentals site

additionally, i found a few great resources for using webgpu for image filters, namely work by Alain Galvan and Maxim McNair