Learning Vulkan

I had dealt with graphics pipelines before (a wrapped-up version of OpenGL most recently), so I considered myself pretty well acquainted with what it takes to make a graphics pipeline: Uniform Buffers, Frame Buffers, Descriptors, etc, but this was my first time building one from scratch. And of course, it's true what they say - that Vulkan has low overhead, because it doesn't do anything unless you tell it to. Fortunately, there's excellent documentation, tutorials, and debugging (in the form of Validation Layers).But there's still a ton of work involved. You can see the sheer amount of data required to create the pipelineInfo{} above, where each &referenced variable had a roughly similar construction. Even with Vulkan's reputation, I was surprised at just how much there was.But I also found that much of what Vulkan could do, although very cool, just created many extra hoops to jump through. I've seen it compared to Assembly vs C++, where Vulkan could be faster, but only if you're very particular or very clever, (of which I am neither (in graphics) at the moment).One of the greatest difficulties I encountered was trying to setup another Uniform Buffer Object to contain data for the point-lights in the scene. Filling buffers correctly is already tricky enough, but in Vulkan I had to run around various points of the pipeline, designating everything from the shader stage to use it in, to descriptors buffers, to descriptorSets, to binding VKBuffers to command buffers - and managing arrays of them to keep up with the frames-in-flight as well. But as you can see we got there in the end.