Beginners coming into our little corner of the programming world have it rough. Normal CPU-centric programming tends to start out with a “Hello World” sample, which can be completed in mere minutes. It takes far longer to simply download the toolchains and set them up. If you’re on a developer friendly OS, this can be completed in seconds as well.
However, in the graphics world, young whippersnappers cut their teeth at rendering the elusive “Hello Triangle” to demonstrate that yes, we can indeed do what our forebears accomplished 40 years ago, except with 20x the effort and 100000x the performance.
There’s no shortage of examples of beginners rendering a simple triangle (or a cube), and with the new APIs having completely displaced the oxygen of older APIs, there is a certain expectation of ridiculous complexity and raw grit required to tickle some pixels on the display. 1000 lines of code, two weeks of grinding, debugging black screens etc, etc. Something is obviously wrong here, and it’s not going to get easier.