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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Yep. This is very similar to the "catch-22" that IBM wound up in with OS/2 and the Windows API. On the one hand, by supporting Windows software on OS/2, they gave OS/2 customers access to a ready base of available, popular software. But in doing so, they also reduced the incentive for ISV's to produce OS/2 native software that could take advantage of unique features of OS/2.

It's a classic "between a rock and a hard place" scenario. Quite a conundrum.

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Thinking about the highly adjacent graphics APIs history, did anyone really 'win' the Direct3D, OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan war? Are we benefiting from the fragmentation?

If the players in the space have naturally coalesced around one over the last decade, can we skip the thrashing and just go with it this time?

The game engines won. Folks aren't building Direct3D or Vulkan renderers; they're using Unity or Unreal or Godot and clicking "export" to target whatever API makes sense for the platform.

WebGPU might be the thing that unifies the frontend API for folks writing cross-platform renderers, seeing as browsers will have to implement it on top of the platform APIs anyway.

You missed the Nintendo and Sony APIs as well.

FOSS folks make this a bigger issue than it really is, game studios make a pluggable API on their engine and call it a day, move on into everything else that matters in actually delivering a game.

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