Most examples seem to be using GLSL shaders for the kernel, but posts seem to indicate it uses SPIR-V as input [https://community.khronos.org/t/is-a-vulkan-compute-shader-d...]. And then you have threads like this [https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/amd-dropped-sp...] saying that SPIR-V isn't supported on the AMD's Windows driver (I had similar issues myself trying to get SYCL examples to run), though I see other places running Vulkan Compute stuff on AMD+Windows. Maybe that only applies to SPIR-V with an OpenCL runtime?

Diagrams [https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/apis/2020-spir-landin...] seem to indicate that you can feed stuff like OpenCL and SYCL into SPIR-V (and then Vulkan Compute) instead of GLSL. For the former case, would you essentially still be using OpenCL, but just with a different runtime? (though articles like this [https://linuxreviews.org/The_State_Of_OpenCL_To_Vulkan_Compu...] seem to suggest OpenCL -> Vulkan isn't in a good state)

Most of the time, when people say OpenCL, they mean that an OpenCL driver is provided by the GPU vendor. That's what's in a particularly sorry state. Many vendors ship OpenCL but have deprecated it. AMD's ROCm is based on OpenCL, but they don't support it on all cards and there are problems.

The other thing that's picking up steam lately is using a lower level API such as Vulkan as the interface to the graphics hardware, and having a layer that runs the compute workload (whether OpenCL or something else) on top of that. In my opinion, this actually has a pretty good future. On Linux, Vulkan is obviously the way to go, on Windows it's supported by all major cards, and on mac it's possible to fake it with MoltenVK. This is what clspv and clvk are about, but from the article you posted these are not in usable shape yet. I think that might say more about the level of interest around OpenCL than anything else though. It's entirely possible that running compute on Vulkan becomes mainstream through other efforts like IREE than by porting OpenCL workloads.

In a couple years or so, there's a good chance the landscape will shift again, as WebGPU might be capable of running compute workloads well, and is likely to be supported by all vendors. Note that despite "web" in the name, it doesn't require a browser or other web technology. You can run prototypes of it today, but there are still huge chunks of the ecosystem missing.

That thread is talking about SPIR (the OpenCL binary shader format) in the OpenCL implementation, not SPIR-V (the Vulkan binary shader format, which has also been adopted by other APIs) in the Vulkan implementation.