The perils of federated protocols

Ten years later, still no sign of it ever becoming usable.

Define “usable”, please. All the HPC is built today around GPGPU and similar architectures (things like Xeon Phi, it's used on your mobile phone (to process photos in real-time and do other compute-intensive things) and so on.

The fact that Linux distros (and desktop in general) are no longer in the center of this development is unfortunate (especially since lots of development is based on Linux), but it does not mean that all that development have just stopped and disappeared.

One day Vulkan might work, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

Vulkan works today (although not that many apps use it), Metal is used by real apps, too (look here - there are links to appstore where they could be found). Sure, you couldn't use it on your device if your insist on 100% OS but most users out there don't care and use it just fine.

And while WebGL is usable today don't forget that we are talking about technology which is almost two decades old (DirectX was released in 1996 and OpenGL is even older then that).

Sure, you could counter that other unfederated APIs (things like Glade, e.g.) have died—but there are emulators and people still play these games.

My point was that most platforms had 3D by the end of XX century while Web needed another decade before it got it and, ironically enough, exactly when web finally, finally, arrived on that decade-old platform the rest of the world already moved and shifted to significantly different 3D API! When would web have things like Metal, Renderscript or Metal? My guess is: most likely answer is “never”—and if Android will, indeed, arrive on desktop even WebGL and WebRTC could become unavailable eventually (since people would use native apps instead of webapps for things like videocalls or maps)—although that is not guaranteed, freeze a-la SMTP is more likely.