The Vulkan Roadmap definitions are supposed to address this problem for the 95% use case.
If you want to be at the bleeding edge of technology, you're always going to have to put in some extra work. At least Vulkan makes that possible: vendor extensions often expose features earlier than they appear in D3D12 at all. (Though D3D12 vendor extensions also exist -- if anything, they're messier than the Vulkan counterpart.)
There are higher levels. In the Rust world, there's "Wgpu", which provides a unified Vulkan-like interface over Linux (Vulkan), Windows (Vulkan or DX12), Apple's Metal, Android, and Web (WGPU). The desktop systems all work pretty much the same, but the Android and Web models run into the limited threading model of those platforms and need some special cases. This level is well supported.
At the WGPU level, you're still managing buffers in the application. The next level up is Rend3. This hides the underlying layers. The application creates meshes and 2D textures, and feeds them to Rend3, which puts them in the GPU and takes care of GPU memory allocation and safety. The application also creates materials, which collect up all the parameters and textures needed for an object, and Objects, which take a material, a mesh, and a transform and put the object on screen. At this level you're in safe Rust and can ignore what platform you are on. It's like old-school OpenGL, but all retained mode. This level needs more people working on it.
If that's not enough abstraction, there are game engines.
Looking at DirectX 12 Ultimate features still missing, doesn't really look like they come first to Vulkan.
Then there is the whole mess of shading languages going on, with the stagnation of GLSL, using HLSL as kind of alternative but not quite due to HLSL semantics, and then the explosion of alternatives.
Which DX12 Ultimate features are missing from Vulkan?
They may be missing from Roadmap definitions, but that wasn't my point. Vulkan is often first for innovation being accessible / possible in some form, but DX12 is usually first for "platform standardization", loosely defined.
Your comment about languages even reinforces the point: there isn't really an ecosystem for language innovation on top of D3D12.
Comments
The Vulkan Roadmap definitions are supposed to address this problem for the 95% use case.
If you want to be at the bleeding edge of technology, you're always going to have to put in some extra work. At least Vulkan makes that possible: vendor extensions often expose features earlier than they appear in D3D12 at all. (Though D3D12 vendor extensions also exist -- if anything, they're messier than the Vulkan counterpart.)
There are higher levels. In the Rust world, there's "Wgpu", which provides a unified Vulkan-like interface over Linux (Vulkan), Windows (Vulkan or DX12), Apple's Metal, Android, and Web (WGPU). The desktop systems all work pretty much the same, but the Android and Web models run into the limited threading model of those platforms and need some special cases. This level is well supported.
At the WGPU level, you're still managing buffers in the application. The next level up is Rend3. This hides the underlying layers. The application creates meshes and 2D textures, and feeds them to Rend3, which puts them in the GPU and takes care of GPU memory allocation and safety. The application also creates materials, which collect up all the parameters and textures needed for an object, and Objects, which take a material, a mesh, and a transform and put the object on screen. At this level you're in safe Rust and can ignore what platform you are on. It's like old-school OpenGL, but all retained mode. This level needs more people working on it.
If that's not enough abstraction, there are game engines.
Looking at DirectX 12 Ultimate features still missing, doesn't really look like they come first to Vulkan.
Then there is the whole mess of shading languages going on, with the stagnation of GLSL, using HLSL as kind of alternative but not quite due to HLSL semantics, and then the explosion of alternatives.
Which DX12 Ultimate features are missing from Vulkan?
They may be missing from Roadmap definitions, but that wasn't my point. Vulkan is often first for innovation being accessible / possible in some form, but DX12 is usually first for "platform standardization", loosely defined.
Your comment about languages even reinforces the point: there isn't really an ecosystem for language innovation on top of D3D12.