Now regarding the tooling, since I am spreading disinformation, can you please provide us with the SDK tooling that matches the offerings from Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, regarding their own APIs?
Because what LunarG offers is pretty bare bones, and the OEM SDKs pretty much just provide the basic stuff as well, with C samples.
I guess that someone that rather goes hunting for glm, uses sbt for textures, writes their own font rendering engine, compiles shaders from the command line, only knows about RenderDoc is capable of,... will feel very uncomfortable with the available set of Metal tooling and Frameworks.
Most of the extensions are for what are currently pre-production or fringe features, and the WG showed they're not afraid of pulling important (and even not so important) extensions into minor version releases much faster than OpenGL has put things in core with Vulkan 1.1 (I was glad but honestly surprised that the cross-process resource sharing made the cut).
You're definitely right about significant parts of the toolchain being weaker. In particular sorting out how glslang -> Vulkan works in practice is pretty trial-and-error, and if you want to use HLSL it's even more poorly documented. You have to expect to be going through the Vulkan spec (which I will say is much easier than directly using the OpenGL spec). However the Vulkan validation layers are incredible, and leave the equivalents for Metal, DirectX, and especially OpenGL in the dust.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
Clicking a bit around, gives the Vulkan support version per device, which on Android is a mess, unless one only cares about flagship devices.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=android
Now regarding the tooling, since I am spreading disinformation, can you please provide us with the SDK tooling that matches the offerings from Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, regarding their own APIs?
Because what LunarG offers is pretty bare bones, and the OEM SDKs pretty much just provide the basic stuff as well, with C samples.
I guess that someone that rather goes hunting for glm, uses sbt for textures, writes their own font rendering engine, compiles shaders from the command line, only knows about RenderDoc is capable of,... will feel very uncomfortable with the available set of Metal tooling and Frameworks.
And this is one of the best tutorials available for Vulkan beginners, https://vulkan-tutorial.com