Jonathan Blow

I think we should do what we did in the 1970s, which worked much better than what we are doing today.

But that's not an option if I want to program GPUs today. I want a CPU-style toolchain straight to machine code for major GPUs cross-platform too. But that's not an option unless I form a decade-long conspiracy of friends to become execs at Apple, MSFT, AMD, Intel, Nvidia...

Somebody has to be the adult in the room or things will continue to get worse.

Like which concrete people do you want to do what concrete action? Everyone should stop working on GPU stuff until execs pay attention to the strike? Just everyone complain on Twitter? Anyone who wants to use a GPU should try to become a MSFT GPU exec instead?

Know what’s extremely off-putting? Learned helplessness. Don’t be helpless.

I already mentioned one of the two plans to a new driver equilibrium I think have a smidge of hope, the other being try to piggy-back off of WebGPU momentum and then work down unifying drivers from there. I'm interested in how you think we might get there. What's your plan?

There are many possibilities. One is, build the thing. Build a pretend instruction set that is at a low level such that it would be targetable by any high-level language. Do a pass for LLVM that outputs to this. Then do all the gross garbage that up-translates this to

all the various shading languages. In the short term this is just another sucky shader language, but at least now it's at the right level of abstraction, so someone can do driver-level support in Linux, for example, then continue from there.