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It's how Apple has been operating for 10 years with dozens of other frameworks. Plenty of people have been writing programs against Foundation, CoreAudio, MapK
by ken 9y ago
It's how Apple has been operating for 10 years with dozens of other frameworks. Plenty of people have been writing programs against Foundation, CoreAudio, MapKit, EventKit, etc, for their {mac,i,tv,watch}OS apps, and obviously different libraries for any other platforms they wish to target.
I do agree that this time it might be different. There's no great cross-platform open-spec solution for, say, EventKit, so when Apple offers up their own API, we've just gone with it. Game Developers are a huge existing community, in a way that Calendar Developers are not. Metal and Vulkan are an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
As someone who learned to program in the 1980's, it's pretty amazing that it's getting feasible to target high-performance graphics on every major platform from a single code base. Targeting every user in the world using only 2 graphics libraries doesn't seem so terrible to me. Consider how different the "Lemmings" source code must have been for Commodore Amiga versus the Commodore C=64, for example, not to mention the other 25 platforms it was ported to.
- jheriko 9y ago> Plenty of people have been writing programs against ... Maybe in absolute terms, but relatively speaking these things could not exist and nothing would change. They are /exceptionally niche/ libraries at best .. non-existent if honest
- eropple 9y agoEmphatically untrue for Core Audio.
- eropple 9y agoCore Audio is the one of those tools that I know pretty well, and the reason people use Core Audio is because it is legitimately better than the other options out there. I recently had to retool my video rig to use ASIO on Windows for audio rather than Core Audio on an OS X sidecar and it's way more finicky and difficult to work with. Metal has no such argument, to the best of my knowledge.
- AlphaSite 9y agoMetal predates Vulcan. It is also nice in someways in that its not a pure c api iirc.
- pjmlp 9y agoYep, fully OO, C++14 shaders and all the respective libraries for textures, fonts, scene definitions,.... Vulkan is the typical Khronos API, pure C, has the extension dance to find out what is available, just knows about pixels and for everything else everyone needs to go fishing for libraries.
- Phrodo_00 9y agoJust for curiosity, does it predate Mantle?
- AlphaSite 9y agoI think metal is based on mantle from before it was announced api understand it, DX12 is similar.