`wgpu` often panics on errors

[emilk]

For instance, I get this in my browser:

Error] panicked at 'wgpu error: Validation Error

Caused by:
    In Device::create_render_pipeline
    Color state [0] is invalid
    Format Rgba8UnormSrgb can't be multisampled

', /home/jp/.cargo/git/checkouts/wgpu-b5b0e12eef369ba9/de497ae/wgpu/src/backend/direct.rs:3019:5

The error message is pretty good, but I would prefer to get an Err instead of a panic.

Here is the code from wgpu/src/backend/direct.rs:

    #[track_caller]
    fn handle_error_fatal(
        &self,
        cause: impl Error + Send + Sync + 'static,
        operation: &'static str,
    ) -> ! {
        panic!("Error in {operation}: {f}", f = self.format_error(&cause));
    }

This is not a big problem; if returning a Result would be extremely annoying for some reason, then the current behavior is good enough, but usually it is bad manners for a library to panic when it could use Result instead.

[Wumpf]

Related to

• Clarify error handling in documentation #3767

[cwfitzgerald]

Due to us wanting to abstract over WebGPU which has completely asynchronous error handling we need to use WebGPU style error handling for native as well. We have discussed having a native only version that returns an Error, but how much we diverge on native is a long standing debate. I'm going to close in favor of #3767 and add information there about the functions to call.