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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

OpenGL is less painful in the long run, because you won't be tied to Microsoft's APIs. Those APIs weaken you and your ability to think about graphics programming.

All you need is a good GL wrapper. If writing your own is painful, just use someone else's. But it's important to be able to write your own, because if you can't, then that's what weakens you.

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"Those APIs weaken ... your ability to think about graphics programming." - what is the justification for this? I don't really see that it follows, as virtually all of the interesting stuff (CPU code, shaders) is API-agnostic.

A GPU doesn't work in the way that Microsoft would have you believe it works. By restricting your worldview to Microsoft's predefined notion of what it should be, you'll never know the true extent of what you can do as a graphics programmer.

A secondary reason to avoid DX is because gaming on windows has a high chance of being dead within the next decade. If that seems laughable, think of how laughable it would've sounded for anyone to say that about CDs for music in 2001.

Well, I was hoping for some further explanation, but for what I paid this is fine ;)

I was under the impression that DX11 (and DX10 before it) actually do a decent job of exposing basically everything that's widely supported, and in a manner that can be made to work tolerably efficiently across a range of different hardware. But I was told this by some guy from MS so maybe I shouldn't have expected him to say anything else.

Assuming it's the case, perhaps I'm just cheating by not thinking of the leftovers as useful - not because the behaviour is useless, I mean, just because if you're targeting PC, you just have to accept that the underlying hardware could be anything. OpenGL extensions could provide you with more, but support can be a bit hit or miss. Reminds me too much of MS-DOS.

But I could have been misinformed, or my supposition is simply outdated, and the article suggests that could well have been the case, in which case my conclusion would be partly bogus too.

By restricting your worldview to Microsoft's predefined notion of what it should be, you'll never know the true extent of what you can do as a graphics programmer

can't you just as well say that By restricting your worldview to OpenGl's predefined notion of what it should be, you'll never know the true extent of what you can do as a graphics programmer ? I probably don't have enough experience with it, but to me it seemds in the end both DirectX11 and latest OpenGL pretty much have equal capabilities apart from some details? Not like DirectX7 for instance, which obviously is capable of less.

OpenGL is driven by the hardware vendors. It's developed a lot like html5, extensions get exposed and tested and get standardised based on that experience.

I definitely see Linux becoming a big platform for gaming, but I think they'll probably coexist.

> shaders What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glsl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hlsl

For posterity:

http://aras-p.info/blog/2014/03/28/cross-platform-shaders-in...

(I've never worked on a cross-platform project where HLSL vs GLSL seemed to be a big deal.)

> All you need is a good GL wrapper. If writing your own is painful, just use someone else's. But it's important to be able to write your own, because if you can't, then that's what weakens you.

I have seen exactly zero good OpenGL wrappers. The stateful API makes it pretty much impossible to wrap in a way that would actually make it better.

I have also wasted a lot of time trying to implement some kind of a GL wrapper. I got something done that was fairly comfortable to use for my own needs but nowhere close to being an universal wrapper of any kind.

Have you got a decent GL wrapper to recommend?

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