Top all-time · #10249
Sebastian Aaltonen
Personal blog · sebastianaaltonen.com/bloggamesprogramminghardware
Sebastian Aaltonen's personal blog at sebastianaaltonen.com covers games, programming and hardware. Since 2025, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “No Graphics API”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Sebastian Aaltonen's "No Graphics API" post, which proposes a simpler, CUDA-like GPU programming API, when discussing Vulkan, Metal, shader tooling and graphics education.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sebastian Aaltonen has 30 years of professional game and engine development experience across PC, console, mobile and web platforms.
Most-linked posts?
- No Graphics API6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-12-16
- /blog/no-graphics-api/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-27
What Hacker News says?
See also https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk And https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust”Submitted No Graphics API as a story · 834 points
HN discussionJust in case you haven't already read this: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api/
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api/
on “I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0”It's mostly hardware design limitations. GPU hardware is way more diverse than CPU hardware, so you need to distribute shaders as either source code or a portable intermediate representation, in both cases compiled at runtime for the user's actual GPU. There are also many fixed function parts of the graphics pipeline with wildly different behavior on different hardware which you need to abstract over. And it all run…
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api/
on “I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0”After reading Sebastian Aaltonen's No Graphics API blog post [1], now I'm working on implementing the suggested API using Metal 4. Also I gave that blog post to Claude Code and asked to implement the API and it made terrible terrible mistakes. [1] https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)”Because the low level details tend to change over time and then it's too late and you're committed to supporting something that doesn't make sense anymore. like branch delay slots in some RISC cpus, or vulkan ( https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api )
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications”Does this evolution of the Vulkan API get closer to the model explained in https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api which we discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293062 ?
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “Simplifying Vulkan One Subsystem at a Time”The one and only Holy Bible of Graphics Programming. If you're starting to learn computer graphics, just study through the entire site and do the examples one by one. It doesn't matter one bit that it uses a slightly outdated API called OpenGL - you're supposed to learn how to render things first, not about some weird obscure hardware / driver details! After you've learned it, you can start learning CUDA if you want…
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL”In 2026: Yes yes, please please learn this if you're beginning computer graphics. This is basically the One and Only Holy Bible of graphics programming, and dealing with a slightly outdated and weird API doesn't make it worse even a teeny bit. You will never get the same quality of fundamental education material from any of the other tutorials ( especially Vulkan ones, since most of them assume you already know the…
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL”Hah, we had this since the beginning in CUDA! (Circa 2008) It's baffling how little has been invested in shader language tooling - probably set back graphics programming in the game industry about a decade or so. I just wish there was a proper CUDA-like shading language with a simple API, like what Sebastian Aaltonen suggested in https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api .
Comment linking /blog/no-graphics-api
on “An Experimental Approach to Printf in HLSL”
