WebGL Compute (or glc for short) is an extremely lightweight and powerful module that lets you run massive parallel computations on the GPU directly from your browser! It aims to abstract as much of the library-specific nuances of WebGL as possible so you can just focus on the good stuff!
glc introduces two key data types: TFBO and TComputation.
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TFBOcan be thought of as a big 2-dimensional array of vectors that can be read and written in parallel. We'll call these individual vectors "pixel-vectors". ATFBOcan be used as the output destination for a computation or as an input argument. Under the hood, it's composed of a WebGL Framebuffer Object and its attached texture object. -
TComputationrepresents a compiled program that can be run with dynamic inputs and output destinations. It holds a WebGL program made from a full-screen quad vertex shader and a partially user-defined fragment shader which specifies the output value for each "pixel-vector". It also keeps a mapping from argument names to their corresponding uniform locations so we can link the passed arguments when calling it.
Conceptually, you can think of TFBOs as "registers" and TComputations as "instructions" of a processor. Writing a glc program is like designing a special-purpose processor where you have to explicitly think about what each register is designated for and define a fixed set of instructions to optimally accomplish your goal. This gives you a lot of low-level control over exactly how much memory and power your program uses.