PNGine: A WebGPU shader portability engine

I've been working on a minimal shader portability engine since mid-2024. It was used by me and my friend icid to create a demo for the Inércia demoparty 2025 that happened in Almada in early December. The demo failed spectacularly. We couldn't show it during the competition because it crashed the browser tab on the machine running the demos. Shortly after, we found it also didn't work on most computers and devices. At one point it even stopped working on my own machine. After the party we spent a few days thinking over what went wrong. That led me to fix and redesign parts of the engine, optimize loose ends I'd left for "future me or some capable LLM," and finally write this post before the story repeats itself. What PNGine Is Bundle WebGPU shaders and pipeline configuration into a…