Serious case of NIH...

I have also created the helper function assert() that does what you would expect ...

    ...
    int *base = 0;
    *base = 1;

Just call abort [1]. Or better yet, just call assert [2].

Then, in favour of using the Vulcan SDK, it continues:

just need to copy vulkan.h and vk_platform.h to our application folder ... [i]f you run this piece of code you will notice that you might have found no layer... This is because, at leat on my system, the loader could not find any layer. To get some validation layers we need the SDK ... [w]hat I found out during the process of trying to figure out if you needed the SDK or not is that you only need the .json and the .dll of the layer you want somewhere on your project folder and then you can setup the VK_LAYER_PATH environment variable to the path to the folder with those files.

This is not how you build reliable software. Use the IDE/SDK/standard libraries already! You'll be done quicker. With less undefined behaviour.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/ab...

[2] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/ass...