OpenFrameworks VS MoltenVK

Not exactly VJ, but could be used for it. https://openframeworks.cc

Since you have C# experience, take this time to learn more about C++ while you continue to look. While yes, it is very easy to write bad code, it's not a huge deal since you just graduated and are just hacking around. Plus there are a lot of helpers these days to make writing bad code a little less likely.A former mentor of mine gifted me "C++ Without Fear" by Brian Overland which I can recommend. It's not too expensive, I think it was $25 or something like that, likely less used. Also comes in E-book form.If you'd like a gentler introduction to C++, may I recommend openFrameworks?

Have you come across openFrameworks (https://openframeworks.cc/) or Cinder (https://libcinder.org/)?

Not sure it checks all your boxes, but check openFrameworks?

I recently heard of openFrameworks which should make it pretty easy to make your game. It handles putting together a bunch of other libraries and window management so you can focus on drawing some shapes on the screen and handling user input. Sounds like love2d but all C++.

let me know if I can help out - also checkout the forum at openframeworks.cc - the people there are very friendly and helpful - especially with people that are completely new to oF...

I mean, https://www.libcinder.org and https://openframeworks.cc have been mainstays of the creative coding industry for a long time now. A Rust take on the problem shouldn't be too surprising.

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.