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Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

If Apple had just adopted the Vulkan standard instead of going off with their own proprietary graphics API this would have been a non-issue. Smacks of Canonical and their repeatedly doing one thing while ignoring the rest of the community standardizing on something else.

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Unfortunately, the renderer is only one step in supporting an alternative platform. Even if we could have used Vulkan on every platform, the windowing APIs are completely different and those do most of the things we like our code editors to support, like typing.

Metal predates Vulkan. But also I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't care if an app is portable.

In fact they probably care that it's not easily portable

But AMD's Mantle predates both & was proposed & what lead to Vulkan. Apple saw the fork in the road & quickly scrambled to build their own thing.

I'm kind of tired of this contention cropping up again and again. Technically true but insufficient & obfuscating more than revealing.

Sorry no. Vulkan literally did not exist. That's not obfuscation. It didn't even exist.

Had Apple adopted Mantle then where would they be now? Apple did what they do, took ownership of their own stack.

"Sorry no" whatever. Khronos was discussing what to do with Mantle as it became Vulkan. Apple was part of those industry players who were invited to the table. Apple left and did their own thing, like Apple does.

These specs don't spring up fully formed. Vulkan was a collaboration long before it was named as such and released; Approaching Zero Driver Overhead/bindless was 100% clear writing on the wall for a while by then. Apple just doesn't collaborate; they demand control. That's why they didn't participate when everyone else was figuring out how to distill out Vulkan from Mantle & other close to the metal patterns that were already about.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo also don't really care Vulkan exists.

Besides AMD most likely only offered Mantle, because OpenGL vNext was going to be another Long Peaks failure, had it not been the case.

And for what, Vulkan is already an spaghetti extension mess, with a complexity that feels like build a car out of LEGO Technics pieces, when one wants to drive down to the grocery store.

Apple _shipped_ Metal in 2014. Kronos started their work in 2014 and wasn't even named as such until 2015. The full spec wasn't released until 2016.

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