[eliasdaler]

Indeed. vk-bootstrap is a bit better with 600 lines of code, though: https://github.com/charles-lunarg/vk-bootstrap/blob/main/exa...

Vulkan initialization and basic swapchain management is very verbose, but things get much better after you do it for the first time and make some handy abstractions around pipeline creation/management later.

[andrewmcwatters]

For sure. They just move the roughly 300 lines of code elsewhere so you don't have to do it, though.

I'd like to see them move nearly all 900-ish lines of SLOC back down into the near 90-ish you'd need to initialize OpenGL.

There's so much overlap in basically everyone's graphic usage of Vulkan that you realize after doing it yourself they should have done some simple optimization for the 99% use case, and allowed other people to write the full 900+ lines for GPU compute or other use cases.

[eliasdaler]

I guess libraries like bgfx, sokol and The Forge are kinda like that. But I just feel like it’s either all or nothing if you’re already doing your own game engine.

I’m okay with using middleware/3rd party libraries for things which I don’t care too much about (e.g. physics), but graphics is such a core component that I want to handle it myself.

In a way, OpenGL drivers were such middleware libraries written for you by GPU vendors (or open source community). But now they stopped doing that and now you’re either writing your own graphics abstraction layer or using someone else’s.

In this case, I choose the hard way. And it seemed to have worked out so far. I definitely won’t recommend it to everyone (especially if they want to make a game in less than a year!), but as a learning experience it was fun.