Chapter 19 Graphics

• 19.1 The Rendering Pipeline and Where Go Sits
• 19.2 Graphics Bindings and Thread Affinity
• 19.3 Software Rendering and Parallelism
• 19.4 Rendering in the Browser

Graphics is the oldest heterogeneous workload: long before “general-purpose GPU compute” became a slogan, the graphics card was already doing parallel arithmetic for every pixel on the screen. This chapter spreads the rendering pipeline open to see exactly where Go’s code sits on the CPU side, and how a single draw call crosses the boundary of the driver; then it looks at why a graphics context is nailed to one particular system thread, where LockOSThread is not a trick but a necessity; it then turns to software rendering, which needs no GPU, to see how goroutines and SIMD lay down pixels in parallel on the CPU; and finally it steps into the browser, to see where the rendering boundary falls once Go is compiled to WebAssembly.