DXIL has other issues beyond being an orphaned fork of LLVM-IR. LLVM is ill-equipped to represents shaders, and there have been real bugs in the wild because of how not-a-shader-language LLVM-IR is. See this [0] post under the 'The classic subgroup breakage – maximal convergence gone awry' section. Read the whole series really if you haven't, it's a fantastic dive into how awful this stuff is.

DXIL is also a useless intermediate representation because parsing it is so bloody difficult nobody could actually do anything with it. DXIL was, and still is, functionally opaque bytes. You can't introspect it, you can't modify it or do anything of use with it. SPIR-V is dead-simple to parse and has an array of tools built around it because it's so easy to work with.

I don't really see how the OpenCL history is relevant to Vulkan either. Khronos losing the OpenCL game to Nvidia, certainly no thanks to Nvidia's sabotage either, doesn't change that SPIR-V is a much more successful format.

[0] https://themaister.net/blog/2022/04/24/my-personal-hell-of-t...

> Khronos losing the OpenCL game to Nvidia, certainly no thanks to Nvidia's sabotage either, doesn't change that SPIR-V is a much more successful format.

could you elaborate more on this? sounds interesting

DXIL has the DirectX SDK tooling.

OpenCL history is more than relevant, without SPIR, there would not exist SPIR-V.

People love to blame NVidia for AMD and Intel failures pushing OpenCL into the industry, and Google completly ignoring it for mobile devices, pushing their own RenderScript dialect instead, even if Apple would have behave differently regarding their platforms, the other 80% market has completly ignored it.