if you think about it, vulkan logical device implies the existence of vulkan illogical device

I'm slowly working through the vulkan spec writing a compute-only vulkan program from scratch that doesn't render anything, and it's going pretty well because the spec is really well written and I already know more or less exactly what I want to do anyway, but I just want to say just how silly (fun) it feels to write a program like this because you get to just skip over large swaths of the API.

Like, I'm working from the spec because the tutorials all make it more complicated.

also the tutorials I reviewed all did the annoying thing where the tutorial squirrels away the stuff you're trying to learn or reference into abstractions that only serve the needs of the tutorial writer, which given my goal is very specifically to *not draw anything*, there's really not much of a point to any of them lol. I'm really not the intended audience here though :3

I think it's cute that practically every vulkan command has one or more optional args to let you enter Hard Mode

(sorry for the double post, I added this to the wrong thread)

ok even with just the compute-only subset vulkan is a slog D:

I wonder how many people have actually managed to knuckle down and write a complete, useful vulkan program from scratch (no copy pasting from tutorials and stack overflow, no offloading significant parts to 3rd party libraries like VMA)

To think if I power through and get this thing working I could potentially be like the 20th person to bother

oh, update on my little vulkan compute project, last night I got as far as repeatedly dispatching an empty compute shader and allocating some memory 😎 I'm in the home stretch! I think I just need to figure out the resources / resource binding stuff and then I'll be able to start on my DSP experiment :3

which mostly means the next things are figuring out the least effort way of getting audio data into C++ (probably stb_vorbis?) and writing even more boilerplate for alsa...

Success! I got the vulkan compute shader cranking out the fibonacci series and reading it back to the CPU through a 8 byte persistently mapped buffer. Should be smooth sailing from here.
ok *whew* I finally did it! I implemented convolution reverb as a vulkan compute shader, and the results seem to be correct. I have it convolving the audio up front at the moment, but it seems to be reasonably fast and the results seem more or less correct. I'm using SDL3 to verify the output. It doesn't look like it'll be too crazy to rework it such that the stream is generated live.
it turns out the main difficulty working with vulkan is accidentally breaking your laptop in half
@aeva that poor laptop