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by teps 3780 days ago
Could Vulkan be the opportunity to build a small and simple API for people to learn graphic programming? I did learn OpenGl 10 years ago but it was already a big mess and each time I were searching for some information I could only discover mountains of hacks. I'm quit sure it's worse now.
5 comments

OpenGL is much better these days and if it's your first foray into graphics programming learning WebGL is not a bad start IMO. You might need to use a browser that can support some of the OpenGL ES features (WebGL extensions) like VBO's and such but you can get really far that way.

Vulkan is not the right choice if you're just getting started unless you're already motivated and intensely curious (ie: already have some decent exposure to OpenGL, multi-threading, and are curious to know more).

Learning graphic programming through Vulkan is like learning to implement quick-sort using assembly language.

Sure, it can be done, but it's most likely to lead to tons of frustration and abandonment.

I was pretty good using classic OpenGL (before shaders), and writing a 100% shader based simple example was quite some work, mostly spent understanding how 4x4 matrices and graphics are related.

I expect for most typical programmers for that to be the hardest part, understanding how pixels emerge from a long pipeline of operations on 3 or 4-vectors and 4x4-matrices

I think porting three.js over to Vulkan (and node.js if it isn't available on desktop yet) would be a big win. You probably won't see much performance gains over plain GL given that it's a javascript library, but it will be a good learning experience.
Yes, it is, but it takes someone who knows what they are doing to abstract the hardware for the user.

You can build a better OpenGL on top of Vulkan, but until someone writes one OpenGL for average developers makes more sense.

Nope. Using a"simple" API is exactly what you don't want when dealing with graphics hardware, because then the burden is on you.