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OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal

OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal to Vulkan. It's very easy to transition from OpenGL to Metal, it feels like an improved API without global state and packing stuff into structs. Meanwhile Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you and you suddenly have to worry about memory barriers, image transitions, semaphores/synchronization, even in the simplest of applications.

Crinus 7y ago
> OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The OpenGL 4.6 spec was released four months ago with new features and extensions come out all the time. > Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you Vulkan's API is unnecessarily ugly, it gives the impression of a low level API with all the structs and such but in reality the driver just picks up data from those structs to move around. In real low level APIs you use structs because they are memory mapped and/or aligned pretty much as the hardware expects it, but Vulkan is a hardware agnostic API. And yeah, Metal is probably a better API but it is also only available on Mac which makes it a no-go for pretty much everyone outside the Apple bubble. Personally i'll stick with OpenGL for the time being. I do not need much of the fancy stuff newer OpenGL versions have anyway (i don't do AAA-game level rendering) and i do not see OpenGL being dropped any time soon from any sane platform. When it comes to Apple's stuff i'll decide between writing a small OpenGL wrapper myself for the functionality it use or just dropping the platform altogether when the time comes and they drop support for the API. Considering they still support Carbon (even if only for 32 bit programs), it might be a while until they drop OpenGL though.

Crinus 7y ago

> OpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The OpenGL 4.6 spec was released four months ago with new features and extensions come out all the time. > Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you Vulkan's API is unnecessarily ugly, it gives the impression of a low level API with all the structs and such but in reality the driver just picks up data from those structs to move around. In real low level APIs you use structs because they are memory mapped and/or aligned pretty much as the hardware expects it, but Vulkan is a hardware agnostic API. And yeah, Metal is probably a better API but it is also only available on Mac which makes it a no-go for pretty much everyone outside the Apple bubble. Personally i'll stick with OpenGL for the time being. I do not need much of the fancy stuff newer OpenGL versions have anyway (i don't do AAA-game level rendering) and i do not see OpenGL being dropped any time soon from any sane platform. When it comes to Apple's stuff i'll decide between writing a small OpenGL wrapper myself for the functionality it use or just dropping the platform altogether when the time comes and they drop support for the API. Considering they still support Carbon (even if only for 32 bit programs), it might be a while until they drop OpenGL though.