Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Correctly Rendering... Glxgears

[smitty3268]

I fear that OpenGL is somehow threatened by Vulkan.

OpenGL isn't going anywhere any time soon. However, it's strictly legacy at this point, there for backwards compatibility. Don't expect any more changes to come to OpenGL.

I bought a Vulkan book and instantly got lost in it's object oriented nonsense.

That's interesting, considering that OpenGL is the one based around a state machine while Vulkan is much more low level. I assume whatever book you bought assumes a more modern design for it's demo code, is what you mean by this. There's nothing about Vulkan that is inherently more object oriented as far as I know, anyway.

If it is that hard to get GLXgears working it doesn't speak well of Vulkan as a language.
What I mean is that GLXgears doesn't use much of OpenGL so translating all of OpenGL calls to Vulkan is going to be very difficult.

It was intentionally designed to be low level, and for experts to use. If you aren't that into graphics programming, then Vulkan may not be the correct API for you. That doesn't make it bad - it just means you aren't the target audience. Instead, the Vulkan designers assumed lighter users would use a higher level library built on top of Vulkan which would provide a simpler way of using it. That can even be OpenGL itself, although I'd hope for something more elegant than that. There haven't been a ton of these popping up yet, which is a bit disappointing, but I do think over time they will pop up more and more.

[Clive McCarthy]

I certainly got the impression that Vulkan was deliberately low-level. Not a bad thing. Maybe it just needs a Glib. In it's pre-standard-library days C could be rough to deal with.

It is possible I just bought the wrong Vulkan book.

I don't expect nor need anything more from OpenGL. I have encapsulated most of the things I don't like about OpenGL in my own code. For example I have a function called: generate_and_bind_opengl_object() which hides a bunch of OpenGL needless crap. At the same time, shockingly GLU is still around.

[Quackdoc]

I'm an old guy. I have zero interest in games. I'm an artist and I have software (about 400k lines of C) for my artwork. I use OpenGL but not in complex ways beyond a couple of shaders. Nobody would describe OpenGL as elegant, I think.

I fear that OpenGL is somehow threatened by Vulkan. I bought a Vulkan book and instantly got lost in it's object oriented nonsense. If it is that hard to get GLXgears working it doesn't speak well of Vulkan as a language.

What I mean is that GLXgears doesn't use much of OpenGL so translating all of OpenGL calls to Vulkan is going to be very difficult.

Driver development is hard, not software development, Zink already has a lot of support, I found most games runs fairly well, and that would cover a broad group of functions, but not all.

EDIT: Vulkan is a lot of work, but the work is more tedious than hard.