yawgl

Yet Another WebGL Library.

An extremely lightweight library to hide some of the verbosity of the native WebGL API.

Most of the methods were developed while working through the excellent WebGL Fundamentals lessons. Many of them closely follow greggman's module from that site.

Why Yet Another Library?

There are already lots of WebGL libraries, including TWGL from the great greggman himself. Why release yet another one?

The main reason: they are not lightweight enough. Even TWGL (described as "tiny"!) is over 6000 lines. Granted, most of those lines are helpful comments, but 6000 lines is still a lot to scroll through.

A second reason: we want to use rollup to do static analysis and tree shaking on modular code written in ES6.

How light is lightweight?

The canonical use case for yawgl is a simple ray-casting application. We therefore don't include any cameras, meshes, primitives, or any of the usual 3D tools.

All yawgl does is take care of the repetitive parts of the WebGL API for attributes, indices, uniforms, textures, and draw calls. But please note: you still need to know how all these things work! If you don't understand them yet, your best options are to either:

• Go to WebGL Fundamentals and learn them, OR
• Use a more complete library like three.js

TODO

• Document API, especially initContext method
• Check tile-gl for possible new functionality
• Consider optional change-tracking to avoid repeat uniform setting
• Implement handling for Uniform Buffer Objects