WineD3D is getting a Vulkan implementation, with no help from DXVK head Philip, because “it didn’t work out.”
When probed for why, the response was simply… “He didn’t respond.”
Direct quotes from Henri Verbeet of CodeWeavers:
In February 2018, we reached out to Philip Rebohle—the author of DXVK—to start a conversation around whether there were any areas we could cooperate on. One obvious area was the vkd3d shader compiler, which translates Direct3D shader byte code to SPIR-V (much like DXVK has to do), but there would have been other possibilities, like sharing the DXGI implementation, or using a scheme like vkd3d where Wine’s d3d11 could have optionally loaded DXVK as a regular shared library. That e-mail went unanswered. Now, I appreciate that different people have different ideas about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, but personally I think that’s extremely rude and uncivilised.
Nevertheless, e-mail gets lost sometimes, sometimes people are busy, everyone gets a second chance. So a few months later, since I was organising WineConf 2018, I sent Philip a personal invitation to attend WineConf, and perhaps discuss things there. That invitation went unanswered too, at which point I was pretty much done with DXVK.
It is my understanding that since then both Jeremy White and CodeWeavers’ partners at Valve have tried reaching out to Philip on the subject, but evidently with little success.
The Phoronix forums already has pitchforks and torches ready, so PLEASE let’s have an intelligent discussion on this here rather than one that will resort to incivility.
Sometimes an issue needs a bit of publicity before it can be resolved properly.
Regardless, I see a separate implementation as a good thing. With two competing implementations, there is less risk of the software author(s) to paint themselves into a corner, which has happened with a number of free software projects.
I see this as more of a problem. It is the XKCD comic all over again
Granted if they have the backing it should work out fine but as with Linux all too often, people take sides and defend their solution to the end of the world rather than work together for the betterment of all.
Hopefully this will have the swing to power through but DXVK has a lot of publicity, wine has a lot of users… I hope the DXVK people either switch to wines implementation or the dev gets on board and helps. Other wise we will end up with yet another half ass attempts in forever beta.
Regarding too many standards, it’s not good to have a single standard or implementation either, because history has shown that will create large amounts of suckage.
Just look at the XHTML 2.0 fiasco, eventually replaced with HTML 5. Or look at the Gnome or KDE DEs, two great environments that historically have leapfrogged each other. So some competition is always healthy, but yes there is a thing called too much competition.
I wouldn’t worry about it, in my experience it will take a few months of grumbling and then CodeWeavers will do something that is better in some aspect and as the other project adopts that, collaboration will happen.
Despite all these high-profile stances, at the end of the day most developers are lazy bastards that do not wish to write things twice unless they absolutely, absolutely have to. And these “lifetime” grudges generally only lasts as long as one implementation is superior to the other.
