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Comment by nickmain | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else worried about about the future of Blender on macOS with the deprecation of OpenGL in favor of Metal ?

This thread offers some hope, but there is still no definitive roadmap: https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem...

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Blender has a lot of OpenGL code, including shaders that are dynamically generated at runtime. There are definitely not enough resources to maintain multiple rendering backends.

If Blender is going to continue working on MacOS at all it is probably going to be through a wrapper like MoltenVK (if Blender eventually moves to Vulkan).

Apple is being actively hostile to cross platform software development with their graphics APIs so I will not be surprised if a lot of projects drop Mac support entirely when they finally remove OpenGL.

Thats one part of moving away from apple i'm happy about, not having to deal with constant feature removal on both hardware and software.

There has been a lot of progress with MoltenVK and polyfill backends like gfx-rs in other emulator backends. I wonder if either would be suitable for Blender in the future?

Meh. Blender is free software. Mac is almost (or is) the polar opposite of free software.

Apple invented OpenCL and gave it away for free as open source. They also were instrumental in keeping old OpenGL alive for all these years. They catapulted KHTML to the stratosphere as Webkit, which was adopted by Chrome, making open source browser rendering the industry standard. Their OS’s are heavily based on open source tech.

If it ever becomes a problem it'll be ported to Metal.

Annoying but not fatal.

I'm more worried about the future of macOS personally.

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