Vulkan also didn't keep Mantle as is in every aspect when it used it.

Point is, MS didn't need to build things from scratch. They used Mantle as the starting point, same way Khronos did.

So the question one should be asking, why MS didn't collaborate while they very well knew the collaborative API is going to happen. No one stopped them form making that collaborative API more friendly or better. But MS being MS they rushed with NIH.

If you're an engineer trying to pick "the" GPU API for Windows the only real argument that can be made for picking Vulkan, the open API, over the internal API Microsoft already had for ~15 years by that point is that it's the 'open source friendly' choice. How do you justify using someone else's API as a core Windows API over your own solution that you already had. There's no engineering or business justification really.

It's similarly easy to construe Vulkan and Mantle as an attempt by AMD to take control of the GPU API space and specify an API particularly friendly to their hardware as the standard. They largely even succeeded considering what Vulkan became. Even D3D12's binding model is basically an exercise in how close we can get to directly exposing AMD's "anything goes" binding model while still allowing NVidia to function. It's very nice as a GPU vendor when your driver can be made closer to a no-op than your competitors.

Too many people pile on D3D12 simply because of Microsoft, rather than fairly considering the context of what created it. Apple made the same decision too with Metal, but I rarely hear any complaints there.

If MS would have allowed using Vulkan on Xbox for instance, I would have been more willing to give them the benefit of a doubt. But as it stands, I see them pushing DX as having lock-in motives.

PlayStation only supports Sony’s own, proprietary Gnm/Gnmx[1]. I heard their APIs are somewhat based on (very old) OpenGL, but different enough to not actually be compatible.

Nintendo Switch supporting OpenGL or Vulkan is an exception in the console space.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software#...

There’s no evil MS lock-in here.

There is absolutely lock-in in MS and Sony's approaches. There is no inherent need in it just becasue it's a console.

There is a reason for NES games having a certificate from Nintendo.

And yes most developers do not care about it anyway if it's good.

Alexander Overvoorde's Vulkan Tutorial is in my opinion, the de facto practical documentation for a first pass Vulkan implementation, but he also does some small things wrong that you just should not do in a production application.

It took me over 700 lines of C for a minimal replica.[1]

I'm not a fan of Vulkan not having a built-in compiler for shaders compared to OpenGL. I'm sure there's a superior technical reason for it, but I don't care because it's ruined my development experience, and reintroducing the behavior requires a sizable increase in CMake dependency overhead.

https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-3d/blob/main/src/g...

This is what you'd most likely want in production anyway, but for my purposes, it's a missed API feature.

What does that mean? The standard doesn't dictate any kind of form of implementation of the compiler. Different OpenGL drivers can use different compilers. Same for Vulkan.