Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing
The IGL also maps to Metal, so you can have a program thats cross platform if you include OSX. Vulkan would be viable for all other platforms that arent Apple based.
A usecase i could immediately see for this would be developing a VR/AR app that both works on apples new headset and existing headsets in the market, be it android based (untethered quest), windows based, or apples incoming vision os, which would assume to be running metal as a graphics api due to the hardware.
Sorta. You would stll have to build vulkan and MoltenVK builds seperately, while I think metas will be one build fots all platforms styles as it removes the need to target specific devices.
it allows you to write graphics code in a backend-independent manner (supporting vulkan and metal for example), looking a little closer, it looks like a nice level of abstraction over various rendering backends 👀