bgfx VS DiligentEngine

Sort of, I'd recommend a modern higher level API. I'm not sure what the current recommended ones are (probably bgfx), but assuming the wrapper is "low level enough", then the concepts you learn are still going to apply.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx for just that FOSS intermediate rendering library (includes Minecraft)

BGFX: Pretty mature and easy to use with many backends.

bgfx. I have not used it, but I have heard good things about it.

There's kind of a lack of this for C++ in 3D, I think it's often due to the necessity of a secondary scripting language in game engines with C++, which isn't necessarily needed in Java or C#. SFML is like that (but also 2D), Godot is similar (but more geared towards 2D). Ogre3D is an actual engine like I mentioned earlier, not sure how easy it is to use. Cocos2d is higher level, but is also 2D only. I'm not fond of SDL, it feels like a windowing library with slow old school immediate mode stuff attached, so it ends up not being good at the rest of the tacked on things. SDL is popular as a windowing library, and it's why you see it used everywhere (but the most notable uses of it aren't using their drawing capabilities), I often see bgfx thrown around, and for you it might be a good choice, though I have no experience with it.

Another route could be using an abstraction over Vulkan (faster, more efficient, more difficult): bgfx, dawn, magma, or wgpu (Rust).

now, java is actually quite a performant language and even if its not most of the performance bugs in mc are due to it being single threaded, inefficient chunk generation and optimizing, and it built ontop of opengl WHICH isn't much of a performance hit but its still ehh idk it doesn't matter that much (NOW SWITCHING THE GAME TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GRAPHICS API WOULD SUCK ASS TO DO (and vulkan is quite verbose :))) (AND also bgfx would probably be better due to it being an abstraction layer ontop of all the graphics apis so minecraft could target many depending on your platform (and also bedrock used to (or still does i dont know) use bgfx before they switched to just two (IF IM READING MC WIKI RIGHT BECAUSE IM NOT ENTIRELY SURE IF THEY USE BGFX STILL ?? SO THEY COULD STILL BE TARGETING MULTIPLE YET THEY JUST WROTE THEIR NEW SHIT BAD IDK))

Neither Apple nor Microsoft want any usable multiplatform graphics API. For this reason, none of them delivers such a thing.

If you want a multiplatform graphics API, you should use a library which implements such API on top of these native OS-specific APIs.

I have good experience with that one: http://diligentgraphics.com/diligent-engine/ I’ve used it couple times on Windows with D3D12 backend, and on Linux with GLES 3.1 backend.

Diligent Engine: They say their engine is the successor of bgfx, but I'm not rly into that topic.

Diligent Engine. A Modern Cross-Platform Low-Level 3D Graphics Library and Rendering Framework Tweet.

Read other people's code (I recommend modern small to medium sized github projects, because large ones can be overwhelming) or else you will forever stay in your bubble of how things are done. For example, I had learned a thing or two by using (and code browsing) diligent engine's source.

Diligent Engine

I'm not speaking out of my ass, either, I have very actively followed low-level development being done towards open-source engines such as Diligent and Wicked. I personally am a contributor to the latter engine, as well. It is baffling to me that independent developers don't support this platform.