> OpenGL is recommended to get started and learn the base concept

IMHO learning OpenGL today just fills your head with outdated concepts, the API is much more confusing than it should be, and error reporting is non-existent.

At least more modern APIs tell you exactly what you did wrong in their validation layers.

I don't think OpenGL and vulkan are interchangeable in this case. I wouldn't really recommend a beginner to start with vulkan. Yes, OpenGL might have some "outdated" concepts compared to vulkan but I don't think throwing someone directly to vulkan is more productive!

Plus, tutorials and in depth guides are much much more common on OpenGL, but that's probably a chicken/egg type of situation.

Yeah both options are bad for beginners, at least for cross-platform 3D APIs (e.g. D3D11 and Metal are both nicely balanced and well-designed 3D APIs, but restricted to Windows or macOS).

As other have said, WebGPU is probably the best cross-platform option right now.

(also IME the tricky thing with GL information on the web is that there's a lot of really outdated and sometimes conflicting information around - e.g. worst case is you end up with code that mixes old and new GL concepts without realizing what's what)

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

I'd heard about this, which I think added to my confusion. My general impression is that Vulkan, Metal, and WebGPU are all separate attempts at modernizing graphics, so they're all kind of related in some sense but they're also distinct and incompatible with each other. So graphics in general are moving away from the legacy OpenGL model (good), but it's also fragmenting (bad). Fair take or no?

The moving away part is taking decade of slow and confusing but still huge progress indeed.

And as other have stated the absolutely CRUCIAL question in picking your API, is going to be :

what do you want to do ?

WebGPU is different because it's an abstraction of Vulkan, Metal or DX. Yes, the fragmenting is bad and annoying, WebGPU is the only graphics API that Apple agreed on and that would be truly natively cross-platform, but it's still new, lacking some features, and evolving.

> WebGPU is the only graphics API that Apple agreed on

It's was an API they and Firefox presented as a proposal for new graphics API. And it was Google who agreed to follow suit (they had their own proposal)

Your average graphics developer is not supposed to use Vulkan/Metal/Direct3D directly, but through an engine.

So in a way it doesn't really matter what these low level APIs are like.

Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal all map to similar GPU hardware, so the basic concepts are also similar.

They mostly differ in details like 'programmer ergonomics', design philosophy, and of course platform-availability.

WebGPU is basically the cross section of those three native APIs.

Isn't WebGPU far closer to Metal than to Vulkan or D3D12?

The good parts are taken from Metal, and the bad parts (BindGroups) seem to be inspired by Vulkan ;)

The original proposal from Apple and Mozilla was basically Metal. It changed in development, but the roots are Metal.

OpenGL is not dying only in the sense that vendors and Linux want to keep support around for legacy reasons and applications which don't need to be all that carefully optimized. It is pretty much dead otherwise, as it hasn't received any meaningful updates and extensions in a while exposing the myriad of features that newer GPUs have made available in Vulkan.

> and apple pretty much despise The khronos group

Is there anyone who doesn't despise the Khronos Group?

Meanwhile Vulkan is supported by Android, Nintendo Switch, Linux.

Windows, Apple Platforms, Xbox, PlayStation (aka where money for developers is) couldn't care less about Vulkan.