Declarative WebGPU with S-Expressions(hugodaniel.com) |
Declarative WebGPU with S-Expressions(hugodaniel.com) |
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
(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
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.
I think I should have outgrown this by now, there is some truth to it but I feel it is certainly not absolute at all, and this is essentially a for fun project with no rules or greater intent beyond that.
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.
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.