Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Well, it was for a while:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12894/apple-deprecates-opengl...

Yeah there is MoltenGL which will probably be open sourced eventually. The real future is Vulkan which is moving to replace OpenGL and for the Apple platforms there is MoltenVK [0] (Vulkan re-implemented on top of Apple's new Metal) which is open source. Magnum has an initial Vulkan backend [1], and many other engines have them or are building them as well.

0 - https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

1 - https://blog.magnum.graphics/announcements/2018.10/

That’s cool I didn’t realize MoltenVK was maintained by Khronos.

I think it was donated to them.

Valve acquired the project and made it open source.

From what I understand it was bought out by Valve and donated to community in its quest to promote gaming on Linux (where no Metal or Dx12). I can only speculate that it wasn't most successful commercial product.

MoltenGL proprietary and not the only implementation of the GL library on top of modern APIs. There's also ANGLE.

It worked pretty OK-ish in my project running OpenGL game on Windows Phone 8. I was using Microsoft's fork [2].

Another alternative is GLOVE [3], which is a software OpenGL on top of Vulkan.

Another interesting project is WebGPU [4] which targets to provide Vulkan-like APIs across various platforms in browsers.

As it's offshoot which is not quite related is GFX-rs, which became a cross-platform Rust library providing low level graphics API (HAL layer).

looking forward seeing ANGLE getting Metal backend, which been just a promise so far.

[1] https://github.com/google/angle

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/angle

[3] https://think-silicon.com/products/software/glove/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU

[5] https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx

OpenGL is deprecated, not removed, you can still use it in current versions of macOS as long as you are fine with the version it ships (which in general should be fine for a ton of 3D games, remember that something like Doom 3 was built on OpenGL 1.5 + extensions and Rage was built on OpenGL 2.0 + extensions). Apple might break it sometime in the future, but Apple might break any API in the future (i have several applications and games that stopped worked every time i upgraded macOS and the developers had abandoned them - one of the reasons i decided to stick with Windows over the years is that old apps keep working) so that comes with the territory.

Doom 3 was released 15 years ago. A lot has changed since then

It is still technically more advanced and looks better than the vast majority of indie games and my point was that if something like Doom 3 (or Rage) can be made using OpenGL 1.5+exts (or OpenGL 2.0+exts, for Rage) then OpenGL 4.1+exts that macOS provides is more than enough for a ton of games.

Yeah, it'd be nice if macOS supported OpenGL 4.6 and even better if Apple wasn't braindead enough to deprecate OpenGL instead of fixing one of the worst implementations (and still the only that has the core/compatibility divide that makes matters even worse), but even with all that taken into account, OpenGL on macOS is still capable enough for almost every game bar the more high end ones.

No browser by default runs WebGL on native OpenGL on Windows either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com