[roblabla]

Vulkan was never meant to be directly used by people who “just want to draw stuff”. It was meant to give engine developers the tools required to squeeze more performance out of the GPUs.

This is a case of working as designed. The people trying to directly use Vulkan in their games without any middleware layer are just generally wrong here.

Regarding extensions, this is just what happens when you specify something that keeps evolving - there’s no getting around this. What you can do to minimise the complexity is decide to require certain extensions once they’ve been around for long enough. That’s what everyone does.

[pjmlp]

It would help if Khronos would promote an API for people who “just want to draw stuff”, given that OpenGL 5.0 will never happen most likely and those people don't want to be stuck with OpenGL 4.6 forever.

That is not what everyone does, because Vulkan gets new extensions updates almost every week.

[loup-vaillant]

> It would help if Khronos would promote an API for people who “just want to draw stuff”

Would it?

What you really want is a stable API to talk to the hardware. It doesn't really matter if the API is nigh unusable, as long as it is stable. Only when such stability is reached, can we reliably build stuff on top of it. Including a "just draw stuff" engine.

We could for instance re-implement Flash on top of Vulkan. Such a thing wouldn't need a standard body to get done and be usable by a wide range of people. (Though in this particular case, we'd likely have some standard body involved anyway, since there's already so much Flash code out there.)

[pjmlp]

So where do OpenGL developers move to, when 4.6 moves into "this legacy thing we would like to drop"?

[DiabloD3]

You implement OpenGL as a middleware that speaks Vulkan.

Basically, ANGLE it, but for desktop OpenGL instead of GLES.

As an aside, Google is adding a Vulkan backend for ANGLE, and Microsoft seems to be adding a DX12 (which is basically DXVulkan) backend (to match the DX11 backend they gave Google) at some point in the future.

So, GLES, in its entirety, is now a community supported, open source, Vulkan middleware. No reason why we can't do that with desktop GL too.

[pjmlp]

So 10 years from now those that don't want to be a mix of graphical developer, driver author and compiler designers, have to keep using a frozen API from 2018, without any access to whatever has changed on their computers during the next decade.

All because providing something like MetalKit or DirectXTK is too much to ask for to Khronos and LunarG.

[DiabloD3]

But should it change? There are issues where updating OpenGL support in drivers broke earlier apps due to accidental changes in how existing features were implemented.

Vulkan and DX12 are far less likely to break existing apps i the future due to far fewer core features.

It makes no sense to have what is essentially an entire legacy middleware in the driver when it no longer represents modern hardware.

Unlike GLES, OpenGL basically can never deprecate features, and D3D9 support will never, truly, die. It's a lot easier to just package a universal shim into existing legacy apps than it is to keep mangling drivers over the issue.