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Discussion on: I'm an open source enthusiast at Mapbox, the creator of Leaflet and 40+ other JS libraries, and a rock musician. AMA!

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Vladimir Agafonkin

WebGL is great for rendering large amounts of data, but is very difficult to use for actual processing and analysis. There are many research papers with geometric algorithms tailored for the GPU for massive parallelization, but pretty much no real implementations, and those algorithms use advanced APIs such as compute shaders, which are currently not available for WebGL and won't be for a while. Khronos is working on such an extension for the upcoming WebGL 2.0, but it will take a long time.