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Buggy Vulkan Code
The 10 Most Common Mistakes Vulkan Developers Make ... |
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Buggy Vulkan Code: The 10 Most Common Mistakes Vulkan Developers Make
The Vulkan API is one of the newest generations of graphics API on the block, which is much of the reason for its popularity. But its ease of use is notwithstanding, Vulkan is quite a sophisticated API with many intricities, nuances, and subtleties that can bite developers, leading to hours of hair-pulling debugging. This list highlights ten of the more common mistakes that Vulkan developers need to beware of.
Common Mistake #1: Array management (misalignment, dangling references and incorrect sizes)
Common Mistake #2: Misunderstanding API/function behavior. ...
Common Mistake #3: Confusion about returning by reference vs. by value ...
Common Mistake #4: Performance issues due to creation/destruction overheads (especially in loops)
Common Mistake #5: Memory usage inefficiencies
Common Mistake #6: Ignoring data type conversion and alignment issues (especially with external data)
Common Mistake #7: Vulkan queue synchronization in multithreading (incorrectly locking/unlocking/barriers)
Common Mistake #8: Thinking that Vulkan is the same as OpenGL (not moving beyond state machine thinking)
Common Mistake #9: Ignoring coding standards
Common Mistake #10: Misusing
Vulkan is exciting and powerful - but lulls developers into a false sense of comfort, leaving themselves vulnerable to lengthy debugging issues due to some of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the API. This can result in Vulkan not working as desired instead causing problems such as those described herein.
The Vulkan API is relatively new so familiarizing oneself with its subtleties is a worthwhile endeavor, as it will help ensure that the software you produce is more scalable, robust and maintainable.
Most people, including myself, didn't learn English by reading the dictionary or stopping to read the dictionary every time they hit a new word. In the same way, I'm sure you didn't go about learning a new programming language or API by merely sitting down with the reference material and memorizing everything (reading and not testing and experimenting). To really know an API or even a computer language, and be fluent in its usage, you have to not be afraid to try new things, especially if you want to get to the next level of proficiency. This requires you learning how it when you're using it in the best (or worst) and most efficient ways.
As the old saying goes, a person who has never made a mistake has never learned anything new.
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