The Vulkan-HPP Dilemma

The Vulkan API is C. It’s uncommon to write full applications in only C these days — C++ is far more common. If you are writing C++, it makes sense to use the Vulkan-C++ wrapper which adds type safety, exceptions, and optional automatic RAII style scoped memory management with “Unique” data types. Vulkan is hard enough to use without that syntax sugar sprinkled on top, so if you are using C++ and it is practical, your application should absolutely use the C++ binding types to take advantage of objectively good things like type safety, and having cleanup work properly. (Or not?)

The Wheel of Reinvention. Or, the Eight Steps to get to Step One.

The wheel of reinvention is a term that I most closely associate with the history of computer graphics, but the idea is pretty universal.  Technology is cyclical, no matter the specific field. All software needs to be a bit more flexible than you originally thought, and it eventually spawns more software because the solution to the problem of a computer program you don’t like is almost always another computer program that is even less carefully constructed.

Maybe Liz Lemon’s boyfriend on 30 Rock was right, after all.

This is basically my take on the Configuration Complexity Clock. I’m not the first person to write about the topic. And since it’s practically a Natural law, like a gravitational pull, I certainly won’t be the last to deal with it, notice it, or write about it. But it is something that popped up on my radar again recently, so I wanted to put it in my own words. Let’s look at the whole cycle of terrible crippling success after terrible success…

First thoughts on Vulkan Video API’s in the context of a post production pipeline

Vulkan has some new extensions for decoding video. Like everything with Vulkan, they seem to be kind of a pain / kind of awesome. I don’t have experience using them in practice yet, but I have poked through the extensions and some sample code.

So… Disclaimer: I’m not *good* at Vulkan. At best, I know just barely enough to have an opinion. A ton of people have spent way more time with the API than I have. And they have done way more interesting things than me. That said, a lot of the information out there is focused on gamedev. Vulkan has a ton of functionality that can be handy for offline image processing type tasks, but you have to figure out some of the details yourself. Hopefully, some of my notes may be handy for you if you are going down this path. Since I have been playing with Vulkan, a few people have asked me questions about it, and I have started making some notes that I figured I may as well share in case they prove useful to anybody. The target audience here is admittedly very narrow — people who know enough about Vulkan to want to do stuff with it, but not enough to just go read the extension specifications themselves.