My impression as game developer:

- Vulkan first graphics interfaces. I mean, OK. Not that I'm in love with this overly complex API, but fine.

- No OpenGL support. I guess this is where world is moving

- No POSIX support. Quite a bit of game engines rely on it, oh well, when google cared about developers

- Nothing about sound (my personal thing)

As game developer working with Android was unpleasant to say the least. For example sound - android has like 4 sound systems, all of them (except simplest one available from Java side) are not fully implemented, and swarming with compatibility bugs across manufacturers and android versions. Oh, not to say that they introduce new one once in a while, with new version adoption slower than a sloth.

I get that Google engineers enjoy rewriting things they don't like, but, come on. Fix existing first. Don't change APIs on us - not everyone has extra million of $$$ to throw on a project to refactor it every time Google decided that they want shiny new thing, which as result is broken too but in different ways. OK. I admit, I exaggerate, but it seems like tough times for game engines (besides super hyped ones like Unity or Unreal, which also has no problem throwing tens of millions).

Note about OpenGL support: I'm pretty sure they'll drag it in by porting ANGLE library which is currently actively worked on. Compatibility layers for Vulkan are getting momentum, but I hope they'll join forces with MoltenGL/VK instead of making their own worse analog.

You may want to take a second impression.

- OpenGL should be a library. This is just going to make OpenGL development easier in the long run. Right now there are too many OpenGL implementations and the differences matter. Running one OpenGL library on top of N different Vulkan implementations is miles better than running on top of N different OpenGL implementations.

- POSIX can be a library too. It doesn’t have to be provided by the kernel. People have been strapping POSIX layers on top of things for ages. This was originally how Mach worked. You can still do weird things on iOS and macOS “below” the POSIX layer (although most POSIX syscalls are just provided by the kernel).

You talk about how hard it is to change APIs… and how much you hate to refactor things every time Google decides they want the shiny new thing. But POSIX is rooted in the 1970s. It sucks. It’s about time to try something new. The entire POSIX model is based around the idea that you have different people using the same computer and you don’t want them to accidentally delete each others’ files. There are a ton of APIs in POSIX which are straight-up shit, like wait(). Sandboxes are unportable and strapped-on, using arcane combinations of things like chroot and cgroups.

Let’s give people a chance to try out something new. Unix is somewhere around 50 years old now. OS research is dying out. Make it easier to run untrusted programs.

>> OpenGL should be a library.

But it's not. Where is this OpenGL implementation that runs on Vulkan? I would argue that it should come as fully open source from Khronos group since they are the ones providing both standards. It's fine to create a new thing with a long term vision of what a better world looks like. But people won't follow if the pieces they need today are just a wish.

[1]: https://github.com/Think-Silicon/GLOVE [2]: https://github.com/google/angle