Comment by pjmlp
1 day ago
Note that Vulkan is only somehow better than anything else out of Khronos, because at least for that API someone is paying LunarG for the Vulkan SDK, and NVidia has a vested interest in now pushing slang as the shading language.
The moment LunarG no longer gets sponsored it will be back to "here is a standard, all the best, the community will provide the tools".
On the SYSCL front, that is mostly driven by Intel, and their own OpenAI tooling, there are hardly any offerings for SYCL from anyone else. Thus it is really only pseudo-open.
I wouldnt consider Vulkan any better in that regard. It's pretty damn terrible, UX-wise.
Consider that for the others you are supposed to build your own SDK from random pieces of libraries, not all of them playing well together.
In that regard, the Vulkan SDK is definitely an improvement.
However using Vulkan on Android is actually hardly any different, given that there is no SDK as such, only the libs and headers get dumped into the NDK, there is a github with samples from Google and that's it.
So bad that they failed to convince anyone to drop OpenGL ES from Java/Kotlin, and use NDK alongside C or C++ for Vulkan, thus now there is WebGPU implementation for Java and Kotlin consumption.
I do agree with the Vulkan code itself, related extension spaghetti, and overall state of drivers, which has become visible enough to have been part of Vulkanised talks for two years in a row now.