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The first terminal emulator based on WebGPU: The combination of GPU and command line is in vogue – and so a project is now being launched under the name Rio Term, which is using WebGPU or WGPU for the first time and, like many popular tools, is currently in Rust is developed. The aim of the application is to be as fast as the competition, but to be more efficient with the computing resources. With Alacritty, Kitty and WezTerm there are already several popular terminal emulators with GPU support. So why start another project now? The combination of performance and easy portability thanks to WebGPU would be a decisive factor in the eyes of the developers – and even a browser version with GPU access is nothing in the way. At the moment, however, the terminal is still in the very early stages of development: only an unstable version for macOS is available for download; the roadmap indicates that it should first become stable before the terminal can then be used in the browser thanks to WebAssembly. Why WebGPU? Background: If you want to use the browser as a platform for graphic (real-time) applications and local AI models such as Web LLM, you usually cannot avoid switching on the graphics card as a computing accelerator. The W3C developed the WebGPU specification specifically for this use of the GPU in the browser. This allows graphic designers to render traditional 3D applications in a development environment such as Node.js. All it needs is an HTML canvas and a WebGPU context that accesses a previously configured GPU adapter and device. The WebGPU Shading Language (WGSL) is then used for the corresponding shaders. Thanks to TensorFlow, the use of WebGPU is no longer limited to graphic applications, but is also relevant for computationally intensive machine learning. The standard is promising, works with modern graphics APIs such as Vulkan and Metal and is intended to replace the previous WebGL graphics standard in the medium term – Chrome and Edge therefore also support the specification in their latest versions. With WGPU, Firefox has had an implementation written with Rust for a long time. Promising start Shortly after the first announcement, Rio picked up speed on GitHub: Within a few days, the project was able to collect almost 1000 stars and gather a small group of developers behind it. At the start it is a pure Mac desktop application, but the browser version is firmly planned. Furthermore, Rio uses Sugarloaf as its rendering engine – an obvious choice since the same developer is behind both projects. In general, the terminal emulator should use resources sparingly: lines that are not updated should not be redrawn (Redux state machine). It also leverages the efficient WGPU implementation and takes advantage of the memory benefits that come with the Rust base. It borrows a large part of its functions from Alacritty, the cross-platform terminal emulator for OpenGL. Desktop applications for Linux and Windows are also planned, but are still a long way off. However, the free project is still very young. Interested parties can find it on GitHub. (kki) To the home page
