Zero-Copy GPU Compute on Camera Frames in React Native — What Actually Worked

The author built a React Native camera library running WebGPU compute shaders on live camera frames at 60fps+, encountering 13 distinct build and integration failures. Naive approaches of copying pixel data to JS or using partial JS-side WebGPU bindings failed due to memory pressure and incomplete Dawn implementations. The working architecture keeps pixels on the GPU entirely, using Dawn for compute and Skia Graphite for rendering via a native pipeline.