My rendering code has always been OpenGL. I now need to support a platform that does not have OpenGL, so I have to add an abstraction layer that wraps OpenGL and Direct3D 9. I will support Direct3D 11 later.

TL;DR: the differences between OpenGL and Direct3D cause redundancy for the programmer, and the data layout feels flaky.

For now, my API works a bit like this. This is how a shader is created:

Shader *shader = Shader::Create(
    " ... GLSL vertex shader ... ", " ... GLSL pixel shader ... ",
    " ... HLSL vertex shader ... ", " ... HLSL pixel shader ... ");
ShaderAttrib a1 = shader->GetAttribLocation("Point", VertexUsage::Position, 0);
ShaderAttrib a2 = shader->GetAttribLocation("TexCoord", VertexUsage::TexCoord, 0);
ShaderAttrib a3 = shader->GetAttribLocation("Data", VertexUsage::TexCoord, 1);
ShaderUniform u1 = shader->GetUniformLocation("WorldMatrix");
ShaderUniform u2 = shader->GetUniformLocation("Zoom");

There is already a problem here: once a Direct3D shader is compiled, there is no way to query an input attribute by its name; apparently only the semantics stay meaningful. This is why GetAttribLocation has these extra arguments, which get hidden in ShaderAttrib.

Now this is how I create a vertex declaration and two vertex buffers:

VertexDeclaration *decl = VertexDeclaration::Create(
        VertexStream<vec3,vec2>(VertexUsage::Position, 0,
                                VertexUsage::TexCoord, 0),
        VertexStream<vec4>(VertexUsage::TexCoord, 1));

VertexBuffer *vb1 = new VertexBuffer(NUM * (sizeof(vec3) + sizeof(vec2));
VertexBuffer *vb2 = new VertexBuffer(NUM * sizeof(vec4));

Another problem: the information VertexUsage::Position, 0 is totally useless to the OpenGL/GLSL backend because it does not care about semantics.

Once the vertex buffers have been filled with or pointed at data, this is the rendering code:

shader->Bind();
shader->SetUniform(u1, GetWorldMatrix());
shader->SetUniform(u2, blah);
decl->Bind();
decl->SetStream(vb1, a1, a2);
decl->SetStream(vb2, a3);
decl->DrawPrimitives(VertexPrimitive::Triangle, NUM / 3);
decl->Unbind();
shader->Unbind();

You see that decl is a bit more than just a D3D-like vertex declaration, it kinda takes care of rendering as well. Does this make sense at all? What would be a cleaner design? Or a good source of inspiration?