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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

Lol, Metal is Mac-only which relies heavily on CoreWhatever dependencies and thus can never be cross-platform, right? The only reason any game or CAD developer even supports Mac at all is because OpenGL is a cross-platform API that works great on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so they only have to write one type of shader program, etc. No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations".

If you're Pixelmator or Apple's own Final Cut team, sure, use Metal. For anyone else that wants to make a living, supporting multiple platforms is a given, so you won't pay the slightest attention to this deprecation notice.

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> No game developer in the world will write both an OpenGL/DirectX/Vulcan and Metal renderer for the purpose of staying up to date with Apple's "deprecations".

Actually, most game developers do that. Pretty much every game (even ones with a custom, "non-AAA" engine) will have some kind of abstraction layer for dealing with graphics API's. Writing an additional backend for Metal is not a monumental undertaking -- it's a tiny fraction of the overall code you will end up writing. Also game consoles, for the most part, use their own graphics API's which are not portable to desktop PC's.

While that may be somewhat true (and I disagree with the tiny fraction assessment, unless you are measuring in some other metric than time investment), I feel like it would still greatly increase your QA budget. Each additional back-end that is supported now requires extensive testing through the game development process.

In my experience, trying to get OpenGL to behave the same way (and with the same performance) on a bunch of different systems is actually more work than just maintaining multiple backends. Testing OpenGL on Windows does not in any way guarantee that it's going to work on Linux, or macOS, or whatever else -- even if you don't add a crazy OpenGL extension support matrix into the mix. So your QA budget is already going to include testing OpenGL on all those platforms.

That's kind of true for games, but he's totally right about CAD and other software. Big 3d applications Nuke, Houdini, Maya all use OpenGL. Before OSX, Mac versions either didn't exist or were kept up about as well as IE or Word was. Over the past 5-10 years they've been reliably released for OSX at the same time Windows and Linux versions were (they all originated on IRIX). They all have a lot of other development going on and I don't see any of these companies making and maintaining a Metal version.

I'm sure the Mac version of these tools aren't used by any studio with more than 5 people, but independent contractors, small studios, and individuals working at home really benefit (or else they wouldn't have bothered to port and maintain up until now).

Well, then maybe it is a good thing for wannabe pixelmators? Create a nice Mac-only tool, profit.

Yeah, but that really sucks for people who use powerhouse tools that took 15 years to develop because we were able to use Macs, but it's looking less and less likely going forward.

I really like the idea of creating more space for the little guy. I want them to do well, but honestly I haven't had the best experience. As someone who uses the professional tools during the day, but has only the occasional needs for personal use I was happy to pay for a Mac-only tool. In practice, for a tool I only grab every few months I often find there was a regression in some feature that I guess is only used moderately often (selection boxes), it doesn't currently support that feature (I can't remember, but it was something like HSV color space, more than 8bpp, or some file format like TGA or PNG--not features you'd add to v1, but nothing too obscure), or there's another paid upgrade.

Even beloved Mac tools like Panic's Transmit, I feel like I can't 100% rely on. At a moment's notice I'll have to jump to something else to finish the task.

I think they're expecting developers to use existing engines such as Unity and Unreal. Most game developers probably already use those engines are will not be effected.

On the other hand, they definitely made it harder for developers to create a new game engine.

Game engine not so much, Apple has always been an "also ran" when it came to games. Moreover, these days nobody is writing new major game engines - it is just way too expensive and difficult to justify vs. downloading Unity and starting building your game. Furthermore, games have always been something that is on the market for a year or two and then it is done for, with the developers moving on.

However, where it will have major effect is availability of any professional software. Such as CAD. Mac has always been a pain in the ... platform to support because of their weird "Unix but not quite" ways of doing things and now there will be no justification to support it anymore, especially in the OSS sphere. E.g. I fully expect things like KiCAD (and also the commercial Eagle which has Mac support) PCB CAD to disappear from Mac as soon as OpenGL is removed. Nobody has resources to rewrite such software to use Apple-specific Metal. Another such project is OpenSceneGraph, a large building block for 3D visualization and simulation applications.

At least there's this kind of thing happening: https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative

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