12 ms·

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. S

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js

sha-3 4y ago
Yep, that's why the visualizations do not run on my hardened Firefox. I disabled WebGL.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bananabiscuit 4y ago
  You should considering enabling it for this site. I don’t see what the downside here would be.
  - sha-3 4y ago
    And it was worth it.
panzerboiler 4y ago
He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don't minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written by 10000 people together. Every essay by Bartosz is so top-notch and a such breath of fresh air! He gives me hope in humanity and I am immensely grateful for what he does.
- 10000truths 4y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times). But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “min” part from the URI, while the majority of end users will still benefit from pulling the minified js.
  - operator-name 4y ago
    That's simply not a very well followed (and thus discoverable) standard. Especially for hand crafted code, minifying functions and variable names only obfuscates what is written and minifying whitespace often only has minimal benifits. In practice this seems to be a lost cause, and links to alternatively hosted source code is more common. Sadly this makes is simple to introduce subtle, harmful differences between the source and what is hosted.
    - NoSorryCannot 4y ago
      The pattern is extremely common on CDNs that serve JS.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    It's hard to guess that extra assets exist on the server if they aren't being pulled down by the site itself. Seems better just to have premassaged source available in a repo somewhere, or called out on the page itself for a downloaded archive.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    A discoverable version would be to include source maps that link to the original as well. That way a browser console will automatically pull up the original.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    People measure minification in byte size (unfortunately I guess you're charged by CDNs by that metric too?). In reality everything text based compresses really well over the wire. In either case, importing tons of libs left and right is going to vastly out-size any minification, yet most fe devs are very liberal with dependencies. Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.
soheil 4y ago
Can you point to what libraries he could have used that would have made it simpler? I doubt anything like would benefit from any type of abstraction that currently exists, unless it was a more interactive application that would incorporate user input etc.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  Three.js maybe, but it doesn't abstract too much away in my opinion, it has a lot of functionality around more complex topics (textures for example), but since he doesn't seem to use those it's probably not worth the hassle.
- JayStavis 4y ago
  Depending on one's skillset, you could use a dcc tool like Blender + three.js to make creation of these visuals and interactions much simpler. Have a look at gltfjsx + react-three-fiber [1] combination, which themselves are abstractions over vanilla three.js. With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think! [1] https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/examples https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/examp... Edit: there's actually a 50 LOC watch example with r3f: https://codesandbox.io/s/bouncy-watch-qyz5r https://codesandbox.io/s/bouncy-watch-qyz5r
  - soheil 4y ago
    Cool example, but all r3f is doing here is just providing the threejs camera, controls and the text with emoji, the watch itself is loaded as a .glb file, where I'd assume most people would be interested in learning about.
    - JayStavis 4y ago
      Yeah, I think exporting a scene from blender as glft/glb, and then using these tools to bring your exported 3D file to the web, is one of the more approachable abstractions. The reason you'd use gltfjsx (which that example doesn't) is to have fine grained controls for every node in the scene graph. In the case of the watch, this would map to having a component for each mesh or gear, which can be controlled with mechanics/physics.
abhayhegde 4y ago
Apart from going to each post and manually looking at the JS codes, is it possible to get them all in one go? https://ciechanow.ski/js/ https://ciechanow.ski/js/ returns 403 error.
- syncsynchalt 4y ago
  wget will do what you want, with the right flags. Try `wget -r https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ --include-directories=js/`, the resulting `ciechanow.ski/js/` dir should have it. Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).
kragen 4y ago
Why is "codes everything by hand" surprising? Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?
- donatj 4y ago
  > Is WebGL a really shitty API or something? Yes. Almost no one uses it directly.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Why not? What's wrong with it?
    - donatj 4y ago
      Here is "drawing a triangle" https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangle.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangl...
      - lostgame 4y ago
        Holy living crap. I was all with it up until I saw the actual full HTML example. That is an incredulous amount of overhead for what is essentially one of the most basic and fundamental operations in *GL. Comparing this to Canvas is almost like comparing assembly to C. I'm honestly very surprised.
        kragen 4y ago
        Though boilerplate is never acceptable, most of that is constant-factor overhead, not per-triangle overhead, and tutorialspoint is not a site you should trust under any circumstances. See my links above for better sources. If you put more vertices and indices in Step 2 you can draw an arbitrarily complex 3-D object with this same code. And there's a lot of stuff in GLSL where you can program directly with high-level concepts like vectors, normals, and partial derivatives, instead of expressing them by hand the way you would in C.
tomcam 4y ago
Holy shit
notjustanymike 4y ago
Fun fact, the time and date on the model is correct as well.
- hennybobbu1994 4y ago
grishka 4y ago
Are you sure about the by hand part? There's a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is copy/pasted or #included from his other work.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  There is repetition but it doesn't look auto-generated to me.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  I wish he'd write a post about how he developed these visualizations. How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?
  - indigochill 4y ago
    > How does one even learn how to make something this amazing? I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter. It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.
- grishka 4y ago
  I asked him. I was wrong. https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417 https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417
  - 4y ago
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I like that; it's a lot of work but a lot of people seem to prefer to have to make libraries work together than to just do the work, and it's timeless since it doesn't depend on any future frameworks; any issues that might come up in the future with regards to browser incompatibility can be fixed relatively easily. Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?
- ojr 4y ago
  I have a WebGL project thats been broken for a few years due to a browser deprecated api, it is not a relatively easy fix
rsp1984 4y ago
I'm observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL / WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath. A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I showed them and they liked it and their young devs asked which library I was using. When I told them I used OpenGL they couldn't believe it. To them OpenGL was the "black magic box" and using it akin to having secret conversations with the GPU in some arcane cryptic language.
- bori5 4y ago
  In my waking up state I read that as “some layer of distraction”. How fitting ;) But back to original post , yes his work and website is amazing.
  - jachee 4y ago
    When it’s time to simplify and/or troubleshoot overly-complex things, I like to use the phrase “The abstraction is a distraction”.
- TranquilMarmot 4y ago
  When I was in college, I got really deep into OpenGL and worked through old textbooks about OpenGL 1.1. I think my favorite one was just called "The Red Book"? It was so much fun. After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool. Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I wrote interactive 3D graphics programs in SGI IrisGL, the proprietary predecessor of OpenGL. At that time I considered it super easy because it was so high-level. Even so, as an experiment, I networked an Iris to a Lisp machine so I could write graphics code in Lisp and let the SGI machine render the output. Good times. History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.. Later he went on to found Netscape. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark
hilbert42 4y ago
" Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL" You really have to admire people who do stuff like that (I can't imagine that I would ever have the patience to do that). What I'm mildly curious about is why would anyone want to do it? Is there a demand for such stuff? I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them? I'd reckon most would be like me in that they'd pulled enough watches apart in their younger years to already know their ins and outs (I've long lost track of the number watches and clocks I've either fixed or disassembled by the time I was a teenager).
- bitcurious 4y ago
  > I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them? Most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    I fully accept your point that 'most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days' but I'd contend that that ought not be relevant (as I'll explain in a moment). First, I should say that I was perhaps a little harsh in my above comment and I didn't convey what I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, I was distracted by the somewhat irritating fact that I couldn't view any of those drawings on two different smartphones (I could read the article but only saw white spaces where the drawings were supposed to be). It was only later when logged onto my PC that I could view them, and even then the whole page was sluggish and a pain to view. Perhaps those with faster equipment and or faster internet connection had better luck. Thus, the thinly-veiled message behind my comment was a question about fitness for purpose—both about the subject matter and its method of delivery. My cynical inference was that if people today didn't already understand the basics of gearing, mechanical advantage and escapement mechanisms etc. then something has gone wrong with the education system in that the basics of how clocks worked were well covered in physics (in mechanics) during my first year in high school—and that should not have changed as we still live and move around in a mechanical world—and thousands of industrial mechanical devices use these principles and rely on people having a good working knowledge of them. By third year physics, everything relevant about the essential workings of a clock would also have been covered at a basic mathematical level: Hooke's Law, gears and gear ratios, friction and simple harmonic motion. Even temperature expansion and contraction and the need to compensate for them was discussed (and in this context the physics teacher even discussed Harrison's famous chronometer and how his design included temperature compensation to ensure that changes in these parameters did not impact heavily on time drift). In essence, by third year, everything of important in that article had been covered in the school curriculum. If articles such as that under discussion are now being used to compensate for the lack of training in high school science then we have a serious problem with the education system. Incidentally, even if one's not interested in clock mechanisms, it's worth having a look at this 19th Century publication on mechanical movements that's on the Internet Archive (there are more types around than most people have ever likely considered: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507 https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507
beeforpork 4y ago
Frameworks change and get in the way when a new version is released. It is most annoying. The underlying WebGL changes much more slowly, and in a much more controlled way with a focus on backward compatibility. So I do the same whenever I can and ignore frameworks to get rid of a dependency. The boilerplate overhead can be encapsulated very well into homemade JS functions that only change when I change them. And JS + WebGL is not really low-level.
accountofme 4y ago
Absolutely the best use of web tech I have seen. The best way to put it, is magic. Great great great work!!!

sha-3 4y ago

Yep, that's why the visualizations do not run on my hardened Firefox. I disabled WebGL.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bananabiscuit 4y ago
You should considering enabling it for this site. I don’t see what the downside here would be.
- sha-3 4y ago
  And it was worth it.

panzerboiler 4y ago

He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don't minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written by 10000 people together. Every essay by Bartosz is so top-notch and a such breath of fresh air! He gives me hope in humanity and I am immensely grateful for what he does.

10000truths 4y ago
I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times). But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “min” part from the URI, while the majority of end users will still benefit from pulling the minified js.
- operator-name 4y ago
  That's simply not a very well followed (and thus discoverable) standard. Especially for hand crafted code, minifying functions and variable names only obfuscates what is written and minifying whitespace often only has minimal benifits. In practice this seems to be a lost cause, and links to alternatively hosted source code is more common. Sadly this makes is simple to introduce subtle, harmful differences between the source and what is hosted.
  - NoSorryCannot 4y ago
    The pattern is extremely common on CDNs that serve JS.
- monocasa 4y ago
  It's hard to guess that extra assets exist on the server if they aren't being pulled down by the site itself. Seems better just to have premassaged source available in a repo somewhere, or called out on the page itself for a downloaded archive.
- kevincox 4y ago
  A discoverable version would be to include source maps that link to the original as well. That way a browser console will automatically pull up the original.
- klabb3 4y ago
  People measure minification in byte size (unfortunately I guess you're charged by CDNs by that metric too?). In reality everything text based compresses really well over the wire. In either case, importing tons of libs left and right is going to vastly out-size any minification, yet most fe devs are very liberal with dependencies. Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.

soheil 4y ago

Can you point to what libraries he could have used that would have made it simpler? I doubt anything like would benefit from any type of abstraction that currently exists, unless it was a more interactive application that would incorporate user input etc.

ThePhysicist 4y ago
Three.js maybe, but it doesn't abstract too much away in my opinion, it has a lot of functionality around more complex topics (textures for example), but since he doesn't seem to use those it's probably not worth the hassle.
JayStavis 4y ago
Depending on one's skillset, you could use a dcc tool like Blender + three.js to make creation of these visuals and interactions much simpler. Have a look at gltfjsx + react-three-fiber [1] combination, which themselves are abstractions over vanilla three.js. With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think! [1] https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/examples https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/examp... Edit: there's actually a 50 LOC watch example with r3f: https://codesandbox.io/s/bouncy-watch-qyz5r https://codesandbox.io/s/bouncy-watch-qyz5r
- soheil 4y ago
  Cool example, but all r3f is doing here is just providing the threejs camera, controls and the text with emoji, the watch itself is loaded as a .glb file, where I'd assume most people would be interested in learning about.
  - JayStavis 4y ago
    Yeah, I think exporting a scene from blender as glft/glb, and then using these tools to bring your exported 3D file to the web, is one of the more approachable abstractions. The reason you'd use gltfjsx (which that example doesn't) is to have fine grained controls for every node in the scene graph. In the case of the watch, this would map to having a component for each mesh or gear, which can be controlled with mechanics/physics.

abhayhegde 4y ago

Apart from going to each post and manually looking at the JS codes, is it possible to get them all in one go? https://ciechanow.ski/js/ https://ciechanow.ski/js/ returns 403 error.

syncsynchalt 4y ago
wget will do what you want, with the right flags. Try `wget -r https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ --include-directories=js/`, the resulting `ciechanow.ski/js/` dir should have it. Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).

kragen 4y ago

Why is "codes everything by hand" surprising? Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?

donatj 4y ago
> Is WebGL a really shitty API or something? Yes. Almost no one uses it directly.
- kragen 4y ago
  Why not? What's wrong with it?
  - donatj 4y ago
    Here is "drawing a triangle" https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangle.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangl...
    - lostgame 4y ago
      Holy living crap. I was all with it up until I saw the actual full HTML example. That is an incredulous amount of overhead for what is essentially one of the most basic and fundamental operations in *GL. Comparing this to Canvas is almost like comparing assembly to C. I'm honestly very surprised.
      - kragen 4y ago
        Though boilerplate is never acceptable, most of that is constant-factor overhead, not per-triangle overhead, and tutorialspoint is not a site you should trust under any circumstances. See my links above for better sources. If you put more vertices and indices in Step 2 you can draw an arbitrarily complex 3-D object with this same code. And there's a lot of stuff in GLSL where you can program directly with high-level concepts like vectors, normals, and partial derivatives, instead of expressing them by hand the way you would in C.

tomcam 4y ago

Holy shit

notjustanymike 4y ago

Fun fact, the time and date on the model is correct as well.

hennybobbu1994 4y ago

grishka 4y ago

Are you sure about the by hand part? There's a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.

emmelaich 4y ago
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is copy/pasted or #included from his other work.
ThePhysicist 4y ago
There is repetition but it doesn't look auto-generated to me.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
I wish he'd write a post about how he developed these visualizations. How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?
- indigochill 4y ago
  > How does one even learn how to make something this amazing? I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter. It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.
grishka 4y ago
I asked him. I was wrong. https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417 https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417
- 4y ago

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

I like that; it's a lot of work but a lot of people seem to prefer to have to make libraries work together than to just do the work, and it's timeless since it doesn't depend on any future frameworks; any issues that might come up in the future with regards to browser incompatibility can be fixed relatively easily. Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?

ojr 4y ago
I have a WebGL project thats been broken for a few years due to a browser deprecated api, it is not a relatively easy fix

rsp1984 4y ago

I'm observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL / WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath. A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I showed them and they liked it and their young devs asked which library I was using. When I told them I used OpenGL they couldn't believe it. To them OpenGL was the "black magic box" and using it akin to having secret conversations with the GPU in some arcane cryptic language.

bori5 4y ago
In my waking up state I read that as “some layer of distraction”. How fitting ;) But back to original post , yes his work and website is amazing.
- jachee 4y ago
  When it’s time to simplify and/or troubleshoot overly-complex things, I like to use the phrase “The abstraction is a distraction”.
TranquilMarmot 4y ago
When I was in college, I got really deep into OpenGL and worked through old textbooks about OpenGL 1.1. I think my favorite one was just called "The Red Book"? It was so much fun. After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool. Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dreamcompiler 4y ago
I wrote interactive 3D graphics programs in SGI IrisGL, the proprietary predecessor of OpenGL. At that time I considered it super easy because it was so high-level. Even so, as an experiment, I networked an Iris to a Lisp machine so I could write graphics code in Lisp and let the SGI machine render the output. Good times. History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.. Later he went on to found Netscape. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark

hilbert42 4y ago

" Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL" You really have to admire people who do stuff like that (I can't imagine that I would ever have the patience to do that). What I'm mildly curious about is why would anyone want to do it? Is there a demand for such stuff? I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them? I'd reckon most would be like me in that they'd pulled enough watches apart in their younger years to already know their ins and outs (I've long lost track of the number watches and clocks I've either fixed or disassembled by the time I was a teenager).

bitcurious 4y ago
> I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them? Most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  I fully accept your point that 'most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days' but I'd contend that that ought not be relevant (as I'll explain in a moment). First, I should say that I was perhaps a little harsh in my above comment and I didn't convey what I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, I was distracted by the somewhat irritating fact that I couldn't view any of those drawings on two different smartphones (I could read the article but only saw white spaces where the drawings were supposed to be). It was only later when logged onto my PC that I could view them, and even then the whole page was sluggish and a pain to view. Perhaps those with faster equipment and or faster internet connection had better luck. Thus, the thinly-veiled message behind my comment was a question about fitness for purpose—both about the subject matter and its method of delivery. My cynical inference was that if people today didn't already understand the basics of gearing, mechanical advantage and escapement mechanisms etc. then something has gone wrong with the education system in that the basics of how clocks worked were well covered in physics (in mechanics) during my first year in high school—and that should not have changed as we still live and move around in a mechanical world—and thousands of industrial mechanical devices use these principles and rely on people having a good working knowledge of them. By third year physics, everything relevant about the essential workings of a clock would also have been covered at a basic mathematical level: Hooke's Law, gears and gear ratios, friction and simple harmonic motion. Even temperature expansion and contraction and the need to compensate for them was discussed (and in this context the physics teacher even discussed Harrison's famous chronometer and how his design included temperature compensation to ensure that changes in these parameters did not impact heavily on time drift). In essence, by third year, everything of important in that article had been covered in the school curriculum. If articles such as that under discussion are now being used to compensate for the lack of training in high school science then we have a serious problem with the education system. Incidentally, even if one's not interested in clock mechanisms, it's worth having a look at this 19th Century publication on mechanical movements that's on the Internet Archive (there are more types around than most people have ever likely considered: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507 https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507

beeforpork 4y ago

Frameworks change and get in the way when a new version is released. It is most annoying. The underlying WebGL changes much more slowly, and in a much more controlled way with a focus on backward compatibility. So I do the same whenever I can and ignore frameworks to get rid of a dependency. The boilerplate overhead can be encapsulated very well into homemade JS functions that only change when I change them. And JS + WebGL is not really low-level.

accountofme 4y ago

Absolutely the best use of web tech I have seen. The best way to put it, is magic. Great great great work!!!