[elbows]

One issue is that the Vulkan API is absurdly low-level and verbose. There are good reasons for this if you're writing a game engine, but if you just want to run simple compute kernel you're looking at ~500 LoC, probably an order of magnitude more than with OpenCL. So the barrier to entry is really high.

It also seems the Vulkan supports a different variant of SPIR-V than OpenCL, with the result that some OpenCL C code can't be compiled to work with Vulkan. [1]

But it does seem like a combination of lifting Vulkan compute restrictions and building compute-oriented APIs on top of it could be a better path forward. Especially since this new version basically seems to be giving up an getting vendors to support the features that would make OpenCL competitive with CUDA.

[1] https://github.com/google/clspv/blob/master/docs/OpenCLCOnVu...