Does anyone have real world experience using Vulkan compute shaders versus, say, OpenCL? Does Kompute make things as straightforward as it seems?
SYCL is the unofficial successor to OpenCL - in that SYCL implementations like OpenCL are based on SPIR-V compute 'kernels'. (Note that these are not directly compatible with SPIR-V compute 'shaders' as found in Vulkan, so implementing OpenCL or SYCL on top of the Vulkan compute facilities comes with some challenges.)
The downside of compute shaders, regardless of graphics API (gl, dx, vk), is that they have an unspecified time limit after which the OS will kill your process. There are ways to disable this in your OS/GPU configuration but there isn't a portable way of doing this programmatically from your code.
Another issue is that if you use the same GPU for compute (or heavy graphics tasks) as your display output, your desktop responsiveness may go down. I had some issue where my desktop got really sluggish when I was drawing some graphics that took 350ms per frame (laptop integrated graphics).