I understand what you mean. We tried to make it as painless as possible by providing a downloadable prebuilt shared library so user's don't need to know the pain of building dawn from scratch. It's just a few seconds to download the first time and after that you just link instantaneously

For those that really do want to build end-to-end, there are community efforts (which I've leaned on) that make dawn builds much more palatable which I link at the bottom of the README.

We'll need to kick the tires to see if anyone reports ABI issues (I had more testing to do before announcing the project but this thread came early). I really want the Google Dawn team to ship a shared library though so we in the community don't have to roll our own.