This is cool, but they should have just used Vulkan. Dawn is a massive dependency (and a PITA to build, in my experience) to get what's basically a wrapper around Vulkan. Vulkan has a reputation for being difficult to work with, but if you just want to use a compute queue it's not that horrible. Also, since Vulkan uses SPIR-V, the user would have more choices for shading languages. Additionally, with RenderDoc you get source-level shader debugging.
Shameless plug: in case anyone wants to see how doing just compute with Vulkan looks like, I wrote a similar library to compete on SHAllenge [0], which was posted here on HN a few days ago. My library is here: https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/vulkan-compute-playground/
Shameless plug: in case anyone wants to see how doing just compute with Vulkan looks like, I wrote a similar library to compete on SHAllenge [0], which was posted here on HN a few days ago. My library is here: https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/vulkan-compute-playground/
[0] https://shallenge.quirino.net/