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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Am I remembering correctly in that it doesn’t support modern OpenGL features, just the really old stuff that the old implementation did?

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It’s fine for practically all existing applications. There’s no real reason why Apple should deprecate it instead of opening the source and letting pro apps that rely on OpenGL continue to use this wrapper. The community could implement newer API features, and then everyone just links and includes the version of OpenGL on Metal that they want.

Wrappers are used by the majority of apps anyway, for example WebGL. Apple doesn’t get to say: “We want your JavaScript apps to use our API instead, and we’ll make the development experience subpar if you’re using WebGL.” — they shouldn’t have that kind of power over C apps either.

It's GL 4.1 Core Profile (which was specced in 2010), in "OpenGL years" that's still pretty new ;)

Yeah.. no compute shaders though, among other things

No… I used to do a lot of OpenGL programming and AppKit supported a fairly modern version… Apple deprecated it and it has really sucked for me.

4.1 is not a fairly modern version. That was released in 2011 and doesn't even have compute shaders which D3D11 had in 2009.

So what? There are plenty of applications that just render graphics and don’t need compute shaders.

What I call "really old stuff" uses glBegin() and glEnd()

Yes, that’s because it’s deprecated and that’s why you get all these warnings.

It's not just about warnings, Apple only supports OpenGL 4.1 which was released in 2011.

OpenGL 4 is not the “really old stuff”

Between 4.1 and 4.6, it changed a lot.

Apple never supported extensions for AZDO, for example.

It's missing features that D3D11 had in 2009.

Compute shaders in particular are a huge feature that GL4.1 doesn't have.

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