Is webgpu a good standard at this point? I am learning vulkan atm and 1.3 is significantly different to the previous APIs, and apparently webgpu is closer in behavior to 1.0. I am by no means an authority on the topic, I just see a lack of interest in targeting webgpu from people in game engines and scientific computing.

For a text editor it's definitely good enough if not extreme overkill.

Other then that the one big downside of WebGPU is the rigid binding model via baked BindGroup objects. This is both inflexible and slow when any sort of 'dynamism' is needed because you end up creating and destroying BindGroup objects in the hot path.

Vulkan's binding model will really only be fixed properly with the very new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension (https://docs.vulkan.org/features/latest/features/proposals/V...).

Bevy engine uses wgpu and supports both native and WebGPU browser targets through it.

The WebGPU API gets you to rendering your first triangle quicker and without thinking about vendor-specific APIs and histories of their extensions. It's designed to be fully checkable in browsers, so if you mess up you generally get errors caught before they crash your GPU drivers :)

The downside is that it's the lowest common denominator, so it always lags behind what you can do directly in DX or VK. It was late to get subgroups, and now it's late to get bindless resources. When you target desktops, wgpu can cheat and expose more features that haven't landed in browsers yet, but of course that takes you back to the vendor API fragmentation.

It's a good standard if you want a sort of lowest-common-denominator that is still about a decade newer than GLES 3 / WebGL 2.

The scientific folks don't have all that much reason to upgrade from OpenGL (it still works, after all), and the games folks are often targeting even newer DX/Vulkan/Metal features that aren't supported by WebGPU yet (for example, hardware-accelerated raytracing)