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WESL - Enhanced WebGPU Shaders

Lightweight extensions to the WebGPU shading language.

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Use standard extensions to enable WebGPU community tools for shader libraries, shader testing, web page examples, and more. WESL adds:

• imports — split shaders into modular, reusable files
• conditional compilation — configure shader variants at build time or runtime
• packages — share shader libraries on npm and cargo

WESL integrates into existing toolchains (Vite, Webpack, build.rs) with a couple lines of config.

Live Example

Why WESL?

• Easy to adopt — WESL is a strict superset of WGSL. WESL extensions are proposed WebGPU features that you can use today. Existing .wgsl files work as-is.

• Tool supported — WebGPU community tools integrate into standard dev tools like Vite and VS Code, with WESL support today. Community tools don't support app-specific custom string preprocessors.

• Libraries — Use shader libraries like lygia, or publish your own. Libraries can be cross published across JavaScript/TypeScript npm and Rust cargo.

Tooling Ecosystem

WebGPU community tools rely on standard WESL extensions:

Tool	Description
wgsl-test	GPU shader testing with @test, CLI runner, vitest integration
wgsl-studio	VS Code extension with test runner and shader preview
wgsl-play	Web component for live shader rendering
wgsl-edit	Web component shader editor with syntax highlighting and linting
wgsl-analyzer	Language server for IDE support (forthcoming)

WESL linkers are available in both Rust (wesl crate) and JavaScript (wesl package), with bundler plugins for Vite, Webpack, Rollup, and more.

Linking is fast and WESL linkers are small (< 20kb), easy to embed in editor applications and other tools.

Get Started

• Getting Started with Rust
• Getting Started with JavaScript/TypeScript
• C bindings are available in the Rust implementation

For other languages or unusual build setups, come talk to us.

Using a coding agent? Refer your agent to llms.txt for a concise description of using WESL.

Get Involved

We discuss on Discord and on GitHub issues. Tell us about something that doesn't work smoothly for you in WGSL/WESL? Maybe we can fix it with tools or language extensions.