My take is that ergonomics are pretty bad, there's a significant learning curve. But I'm also hopeful that it's possible to build tools that layer on top of Vul

My take is that ergonomics are pretty bad, there's a significant learning curve. But I'm also hopeful that it's possible to build tools that layer on top of Vulkan - unlike CUDA, which is a highly integrated toolchain and runtime, Vulkan really only targets the lower levels of the stack. I can't speak to your memory allocation question, as I'm personally quite happy with the default behavior.