Where it all started
FragmentColor was first written inside Pupil Labs, an eye-tracking company from Berlin.
It was originally called PLRender, an attempt at an in-house engine for bridging the gap between JavaScript and Python, and my early attempts at building with wgpu, which was at version 0.17 at the time.
PLRender’s initial exploratory design was driven by a “we’ll need everything eventually” motivation: it had a scene graph, an ECS, reflection-based components, a few rendering primitives, collision detection, and (added later as an afterthought) a generic Shader object that could take arbitrary GLSL input.
The Shader object turned out to be the only piece we actually needed. That observation is what eventually became the v0.10.0 version: a full hard-reset rewrite that removed EVERYTHING from the library but the Shader object.
I’m grateful to Pupil Labs for generously releasing the code under the MIT license, and, in particular, Moritz, who asked the right question at the right time.
— Rafael