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Writing a bindless GPU abstraction layer

Back in December 2025, Sebastian Aaltonen published a blog titled “No Graphics API” - it presented a great history of the evolution of GPU hardware, and gave an opinionated perspective on how we could simplify the modern graphics APIs on modern hardware. Like many graphics programmers, I read Sebastian’s blog post and really enjoyed it - I was inspired by it, and decided to see how close to the API he describes I could get today, layered on top of existing platform APIs. The answer turns out to be “pretty darn close”. The result is a project I’m calling Loon GPU, and I’ve put it up on Github. While the library is still rough, poorly tested and surely filled with bugs, it is usable and I wanted to share it early in case other folks were interested. Currently it has a Vulkan 1.3 and Metal 4 backend, and here I want to do a high-level walkthrough to see how the API design maps on to those backends.

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