While you're at it, do you also not know why they break the URLs from time to time so that you can't follow old guides because they point to empty pages?
Not just at Microsoft, but it's an entire industry issue. It's not a job most Software companies value, so ambitious people constantly leave for better positions and the jobs constantly get moved around to the cheapest cost center where ownership and knowledge gets lost and quality declines.
;-)
Usually I find if you're using an open source library you need the whole source checked out for reference, better than proprietary libraries where you need to pay and sign an NDA to get that access or equivalent support.
A TXT dump of the proposal, with luck a sample from the GPU vendor, and that is all.
Vulkan was famously badly documented, one only has to go to LunarG yearly reports regarding community feedback on Vulkan, and related action points.
OpenGL 4.6 never has had a red book editon, Vulkan only had a red book for 1.0, OpenCL and SYSCL just have the PDF reference, not all Khronos APIs have a cheatsheeet PDF on Khronos site.
directx also has conformance tests.
The directx specs are arguably better in many ways than the vulkan specs. They go into bit level details how various math is required to work, especially in samplers
Lol... while the Vulkan documentation situation is a lot better than OpenGL it's not any better than the documentation of other 3D APIs, especially when trying to make sense of extensions (which depend on other extensions, which in turn depend on other extensions - once you're at the end of the breadcrumb trail you already have forgotten what the original question was).
D3D has a 'functional spec' here which provides a lot more under-the-hood information than what's available on https://docs.vulkan.org/spec/latest/index.html:
At least making the functional spec public was a massive step forward, this is much more useful than the actual API documentation, and also better than the documentation/specifications for most other 3D APIs:
Only reason I need to use DX12 is because the swapchain uses DXGI textures. I hope Microsoft gives NVIDIA great priority and leverage to use CUDA native textures at the swapchain directly in Windows.
DX12 functions ported directly into CUDA will be a big plus, programming stack is literally next to the NVIDIA hardware, do everything under one language and don't need to mess with two language interoperability.
chasing0entropy•2mo ago