If only Khronos and the competition cared about the developer experience....
This is continuously a point of frustration! Vulkan compute is... suboptimal. I use Cuda because it feels like the only practical option. I want Vulkan or something else to compete seriously, but until that happens, I will use Cuda.
Is https://github.com/KomputeProject/kompute + https://shader-slang.org/ getting there?
Runs on anything + auto-differentiatation.
It took until Vulkanised 2025, to acknowledge Vulkan became the same mess as OpenGL, and to put an action plan into action to try to correct this.
Had it not been for Apple with OpenCL initial contribution, regardless of how it went from there, AMD with Mantle as starting point for Vulkan, NVidia with Vulkan-Hpp and Slang, and the ecosystem of Khronos standards would be much worse.
Also Vulkan isn't as bad as OpenGL tooling, because LunarG exists, and someone pays them for the whole Vulkan SDK.
The attitude "we put paper standards" and the community should step in for the implementations and tooling, hardly comes to the productivity from private APIs tooling.
Also all GPU vendors, including Intel and AMD, also rather push their own compute APIs, even if based on top of Khronos ones.
> The attitude "we put paper standards" and the community should step in for the implementations and tooling
Khronos is a consortium financed by its members, who either implement the standards on their own hardware or otherwise depend on the ecosystem around them. For example, competing GPU vendors typically implement the standards in parallel with the committee meetings. The very people who represent their company in Khronos are typically leads of the teams who implement the standards.
Source: used to represent my employers at Khronos. It was a difficult, thankless job, that required almost as much diplomacy as technical expertise.
I know, and the way those members implemented Khronos standards, versus their own proprietary alternatives, shows how it actually works in practice, regarding developer tooling and ergonomics.