Kevin Gibson's personal site

Writing a bindless GPU abstraction layer

Sat, 02 May 2026 10:44:53 -0700

Back in December 2025, Sebastian Aaltonen published a blog titled “No Graphics API” - it presented a great history of the evolution of GPU hardware, and gave an opinionated perspective on how we could simplify the modern graphics APIs on modern hardware. Like many graphics programmers, I read Sebastian’s blog post and really enjoyed it - I was inspired by it, and decided to see how close to the API he describes I could get today, layered on top of existing platform APIs. The answer turns out to be “pretty darn close”. The result is a project I’m calling Loon GPU, and I’ve put it up on Github. While the library is still rough, poorly tested and surely filled with bugs, it is usable and I wanted to share it early in case other folks were interested. Currently it has a Vulkan 1.3 and Metal 4 backend, and here I want to do a high-level walkthrough to see how the API design maps on to those backends.

Neural networks as Ordinary Differential Equations

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 18:46:36 -0800

Recently I found a paper being presented at NeurIPS this year, entitled Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, written by Ricky Chen, Yulia Rubanova, Jesse Bettencourt, and David Duvenaud from the University of Toronto. The core idea is that certain types of neural networks are analogous to a discretized differential equation, so maybe using off-the-shelf differential equation solvers will help get better results. This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole of papers that I found very interesting, so I thought I would share a short summary/view-from-30,000 feet on this idea.

About

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 16:32:06 -0800

I am a software engineer with experience in computer graphics, computer vision, and low level systems. Most recently I’ve worked at Apple, developing a 3D Gaussian Splat renderer that is used by the Vision Pro’s Personas. Previously I was at Microsoft, working on streaming systems for Xbox cloud gaming and surface reconstruction algorithms for Hololens, along with a brief stint working on firmware for Xbox controllers.