[johnnyjeans]

I don't know why you think we would take OpenGL over Vulkan, the former is orders of magnitude worse than the latter in every respect except for hardware compatibility. I work in games, specifically doing engine development. For some metrics, our last game has sold ~400k copies on Steam + GOG over its 7 year lifetime. I am the only programmer currently in a codebase that has some hundreds of thousands of lines of highly idiosyncratic C++ code that uses OpenGL. I also am our only form of tech support with any ability to actually fix technical issues. "without being extremely complex" what an absurd statement.

I use the technology stack I do as a means to an end, and that end is not because I couldn't make a computer do something without the tower of shit I've got living on my desk. It's because I have to make money to live, and that means selling software to other people, so it should probably run on their computers. Most of the thinking that goes into my job isn't mathematics or theory. It's wrangling the absolute clusterfuck of a technology stack that consumers buy up by the millions and trying to hammer some kind of reason into it, ensuring that all the hundreds of moving parts of this massively complicated product run well on not just the computers of spoiled first worlders who think a 2060 is "low end", but on the tens of thousands of computers that run our games which are around 10 years old.

I would much rather live in an ivory tower and do everything from scratch and not have to think about making sure Ivan from Vladivostok isn't going to be shitting up the Steam forum because MSVC decided /O2 means "please reinterpret this code to run 10x slower than it did in your last minor version senpai" or the dozens of esoteric GPU issues I've had to solve over the years. Please. I would much rather be hand-rolling 3D rotation matrices than this shit.