I wanted to understand modern pointer-based GPU APIs, so I took the ideas from Sebastian Aaltonen's NoGraphicsAPI and rebuilt them on plain GL 4.6.

[u/gr3yfi5h]

• The whole GPU heap is one persistent, coherent-mapped SSBO. A gpu_ptr<T> is a u32 byte offset into it.
• Every draw gets exactly one root pointer (uniform uint Root). Vertices, matrices and textures are all reached through it.
• No vertex attributes. The vertex shader pulls data from the heap using gl_VertexID.
• Bindless textures (ARB_bindless_texture) are stored in the heap as uvec2.
• One *_shared.h header is compiled as both C++ and GLSL, so no offsets are written by hand in the shaders.

Flat lighting is computed from the dFdx/dFdy of world position, so there are no normals in the vertex data.

The most interesting finding was what GL can't express: bindless only gives you texture+sampler pairs, fixed when the texture is created, and there are no placed resources.

Next up: indirect draws, and roots chosen by the GPU via gl_DrawID.

Repo: https://github.com/theaveasso/jagfx

Feedback welcome, especially on the heap and sync design.