Vulkan-Docs VS sokol

Pipelines (or in general terms PSOs) are the most problematic aspect of Vulkan / DX12 - much more than synchronization! Large parts of the gamedev industry seems to recognize all the performance issues with pipelines and therefore companies are experimenting with newer models like the VK_EXT_shader_object extension ("Vulkan without Pipelines": https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...).

I've written a detailed comment about this before here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37843946#37845431) but for a much more comprehensive explanation by an engineer from Nintendo read the initial proposal for the VK_EXT_shader_object extension: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/propos...).

There's also Casey Muratori's mail to the Vulkan advisory on 2015 that basically predicts this whole clusterfuck would happen: https://github.com/cmuratori/misc/blob/main/vulkan_dynamic_s...

Apple -> MoltenVK is an emulation layer and doesn't give you as much control as using Metal directly.

Nintendo and Sony prefer their own APIs, NVN and LibGNM, and AIUI Vulkan is a second-class API on those platforms which does not offer as much power, it is widely understood studios use NVN and LibGNM to get access to the real hardware on those platforms.

Windows/AMD/NVidia/Intel -> HW manufacturers tend to prototype and release new features with D3D first and then 'backport' them to Vulkan after a while. DirectX 12 for example had mesh shaders for over 2 years before Vulkan got a vendor neutral extension for them[0]

Android and Linux are the only platform where Vulkan is a first-class citizen.

You could maybe argue Nvidia treats Vulkan as a first-class citizen because they tend to have vendor-specific Vulkan extensions for the latest features available before anyone else. But otherwise, no, Vulkan is not a first-class API anywhere except Linux and Android.

Graphics API wars are alive and well.

[0] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/1423

I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform code (which includes running in browsers):

- https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

- https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

- (start these samples by clicking on the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.

All I can do is give you a couple of Github ticket links where users of my libraries stumbled over the issue (and with different symptoms):

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/376

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/404

- https://github.com/floooh/cimgui-sokol-starterkit/issues/6

We then added a dummy call to a no-op pthread function, so that users can better figure out that they need to use -pthread because now they get a linker error instead of a runtime crash or hang. This has since reduced the 'support overhead' quite a bit:

- https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/456

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

I have never personally used it but I'm pretty sure sokol has an audio library that might be what you are after.

And I asked floooh for similar thoughts on making a website with sokol here: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/825

It's not Rust and TS, instead C and JS, but Emscripten has a very nice way of integrating C/C++ and JS (you can just embed snippets of Javascript inside C/C++ source files), e.g. starting at this line, there's a couple of embedded Javascript functions which can be called like C functions directly from the "C side":

https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/4535a3b4be59eb912e77e04...