bgfx VS The-Forge

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))

Oh, I forgot a few major ones:

https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge was used in No Man's Sky, Hades and Starfield.

https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics is the physics engine in Horizon Forbidden West.

To my understanding, every source I've read says that this should cause issues, but in practice it doesn't. What gives? Did I miss something? Here are multiple examples using the latter approach.

This is a toy project that I've been working on for the past few months. Essentially, I've rewritten all the rendering code for the engine using BGFX. This means that all the fixed function OpenGL 1.2 code has been removed from the engine. BGFX supports OpenGL 3.3 and DirectX11, but there are still some rendering artifacts with DirectX11, so the engine still uses OpenGL when running on Windows. I've been considering switching to The Forge (https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge) if I want to have more control over the rendering pipeline. However, this is a complex topic with significant implications for the codebase. I've already done the hard work of eliminating clumsy abstractions in the engine and simplifying the render pipeline, so it's just a matter of deciding what direction I want to take.

The-Forge might fit:

So, I'm not sure if it is widely known, that Starfield is going to be running on a lot of "The Forge." The creators of The Forge says it was added to Creation Kit in 2019. This will open a LOT of new systems for Bethesda games.