bgfx VS MoltenVK

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))

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Translating between rendering APIs is not really the problem. The GPU design is more different than the API is.

Khronos maintains MoltenVk though, which is "official" as it gets: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

...technically, Vulkan on Windows is also only supported via 3rd-parties (the GPU vendors), Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan either ;)

MoltenVK implements large parts of Vulkan on top of Metal for Apple systems. It isn't full Vulkan but it makes porting Vulkan games to OS X easier.

That's cool. Maybe I haven't thought enough about this. Let me check it out. FWIW it's this PR that you are referring to I think: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/pull/1815/

For Metal specifically, they could adopt and contribute to Vulkan and get access to a lot more software. Right now you need to use a compatibility layer, and surely Apple could just support both APIs natively with much lower overhead. But they don't, because it nudges developers to stick to the Apple ecosystem instead of being able to support multiple platforms.

At the moment the most promising thing is MoltenVK (DX12 -> DXVK -> Vulkan -> MoltenVK -> Metal), but the development is not that quick mainly because there aren't tons of developer that works at the same time on the project. It's not actually a Metal related problem at the moment (they have a road map of things that they can be achieved with Metal 3 like Mesh shader and Geometry shader).

What you asked is already existed for at least 8 years. Yeah EIGHT years. It's called "MoltenVK". So far it's the only implementation of Vulkan for macOS. Basically it's a wrapper that runs on top of Metal API.