OpenGL and pre-12 DirectX were the attempt at unifying video programming in an abstract way. It turned out that trying to abstract away what the low-level hardware was doing was more harmful than beneficial.

> It turned out that trying to abstract away what the low-level hardware was doing was more harmful than beneficial.

Abstraction isn’t inherently problematic, but the _wrong_ abstraction is. Just because abstraction is hard to do well, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Just because abstraction gets in the way of certain applications, doesn’t mean it’s not useful in others.

Not to say nobody is trying, but there’s a bit of a catch-22 where those most qualified to do something about it don’t see a problem with the status quo. This sort of thing happens in many technical fields, but I just have to pick on GPU programming because I’ve felt this pain for decades now and it hasn’t really budged.

Part of the problem is probably that the applications for GPUs have broadened and changed dramatically in the last decade or so, so it’s understandable that this moves slowly. I just want more people on the inside to acknowledge the problem.