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> do you think vulkan will progress into being easier and easier to use?
I don't think that is the goal for Vulkan, nor should it be. Vulkan is a low-level, high-performance API that can be used as the backend for high-level, high-performance libraries and frameworks.
> is it mature enough?
Mature enough for what? It's mature and stable enough that you can develop high-level libraries on top of it. wgpu [1], for example, has a Vulkan backend.
[1] wgpu is a WebGPU implementation; https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu
Have you looked at either Raylib or SFML? Both are somewhat high-level graphics abstraction libraries, but neither are anywhere near the weight or functionality of a proper game engine.
https://www.raylib.com/
You can still use OpenGL. Just not the vendor provided drivers. They are indeed horrible. There are libraries like:
* ANGLE ( https://github.com/google/angle ) - An OpenGL ES implementation with Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, Desktop GL, GL ES, Vulkan and Metal backends. This is what we used to use for shipping our Qt 3D application, that used a bunch of OpenGL Shaders. We used to get bug reports about various shaders not working properly on various hardware. After switching to this, all those bug reports vanished.
* Zinc ( https://www.supergoodcode.com/do-not/ ) - A more recent, OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. I haven't used this one yet. But they are making a lot of progress and it is almost as performant as vendor provided OpenGL Drivers these days. So if I ever have to ship a desktop app, needing opengl, I'd strongly consider using this.
I've had a decent experience with bgfx (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx). It is solely a rendering library (no input, physics, sound, etc). It operates a layer just above a native rendering library, such as DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, etc - those are the "backend renderers" that bgfx uses.
Though I have my complaints about it, I think bgfx gives a good powerful-but-not-too-complicated abstraction over graphics programming; for some design info, see: https://bkaradzic.github.io/bgfx/internals.html
To be fair, in modern GL versions they fixed some of these things. In GLES 3.1 which I used a lot on Pi4 https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/ GPU vertex buffers and shaders worked fine, GLSL compiler in the drivers worked fine too.
However, others issues are still present. There’s no shaders bytecode, they have an extension to grab compiled shaders from GPU driver to cache on disk, but it doesn’t work. The only way to create shaders is separate compile and link API calls. Texture loading and binding API is still less than ideal.