[xigency]

It seems unlikely that any of this will change, because control is in the hands of a relatively few powerful organizations who honestly have no interest in making life easier for software engineers working on graphics programming; and those engineers who do have to put up with it have long since given up or chalk it up to experience; and those developers would probably resist any changes now simply because change requires more work and learning how to do things all over again.

The hardware developers (AMD/nVidia/Intel) have an interest in not changing their device drivers, the software vendors (OpenGL and DirectX) have little interest in redeveloping technology, and the software developers with the most capital, game engine developers, have already found workarounds and hire enough engineers to plug leaks in their lifeboats. The state of tools for game developers is so shoddy as well that trying to retrofit language compilers and shader compilers to work together seems like a drawn out task.

It's sort of a David and Goliath situation if you think you can change the graphics programming landscape on your own. Plus, we all know how poorly these standards are developed over time.

[robbies]

> who honestly have no interest in making life easier

Hrm...I've thought about this a lot, and I don't think it's as much as not having interest, as much as not having time. Or at least...not being able to monetarily demonstrate to their employers that it would be worth the engineers time to generate educational resources and better tools.

I do think AMD is trying to get better in this area with their GPUOpen stuff, though of course, you never know what might happen if AMD suddenly becomes top dog.

[zanny]

I don't think its that bad now. We are somewhat limited by SPIR-V, but we now have the capabilities to write our own graphics APIs and shader languages that can compile to Vulkan /OpenCL and SPIR-V and go on from there. It is nothing close to as bad as the goliath of OpenGL hegemony.

[xigency]

I might not be as qualified to talk about this since I am not actually working on the leading edge, but I know from past experience that development hasn't been pleasant.

[sillypog]

With Apple releasing Metal, I think the vendors do have an interest in making developers lives easier if it helps to draw them into their platform. I'm just glad OpenGL is still supported at this point.