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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

The big advantage of not using OpenGL is that D3D11, D3D12 and Metal all have excellent validation layers which tell you exactly what's wrong when you mess something up. In OpenGL you're pretty much left alone, staring at that black screen.

Xcode and Visual Studio also have builtin graphics debuggers for Metal and D3D11 (not sure if the VS debugger also supports D3D12 though).

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What about Debug Output? https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Debug_Output

Using those debuggers is like doing CPU debugging.

If at least you had posted a link to RenderDoc.

It's better than glGetError() for sure, but not supported everywhere (e.g. macOS is stuck at 4.1 Core Profile).

Because you forget to call glGetError and do the error check on your previous call. In a world where we are driven by exceptions, not excepting and requiring you to check is actually a good thing, you wouldn’t want a shader param exception from panicking your game in the middle of a gun fight.

glGetError() is useless unfortunately for getting any information about what went wrong, because it only has 8 error codes:

https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL-Refpages/gl4/html/glGetE...

There's a debug output extension (or core feature since 4.3) that's slightly more verbose, but not universally supported (e.g. AFAIK not on macOS).

That's a fantastic point. As much as I managed to do stuff in OpenGL for decades, it was definitely left behind DX and Metal in terms of API ergonomics.

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