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OpenGL kind of sucks, tbh. I know because I work full time with it. There are so many things in OpenGL that are either inneficient, outdated, or plain stupid. Y
by mschuetz 7y ago
OpenGL kind of sucks, tbh. I know because I work full time with it. There are so many things in OpenGL that are either inneficient, outdated, or plain stupid. You also can't directly expose it anyway because of poor support on Windows and MacOS. The former requires you to install proper drivers that users may not have, the latter deprecated it and to my knowledge already didn't properly support the latest versions.
So whatever you do in the browser, it would need some kind of translation layer to another API anyway. On windows that's usually DirectX via ANGLE. Even today, whatever you do with WebGL will actually be translated to DirectX calls. On MacOS, WebGL is probably be translated to Metal, right now. Same with Vulkan.
- sesuximo 7y agoit makes sense to me that people would want a cross platform way to write GPU code (I thought that was the point of opengl). I don't see why the web is a special case of this. probably you can tell I don't work with gpus I'm just curious about them
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoI'll be the first to agree that OpenGL is kind of garbage, but I will say that there's a lot of value in having a stable API over decades. I like platforms that stay backward compatible long-term, like web tech. So given that, I don't really see anything wrong per se with webGL, apart from it being ugly, and I think we should just put up with that or abstract it. It would also be great if webGPU becomes a big thing and we can just use old webGL code through a compatibility layer, either in JS or built into browsers.
- jdashg 7y agoOn macOS WebGL in all browsers goes through OpenGL, same as on Linux and Android. On Windows, WebGL generally calls into ANGLE-on-D3D, though both Firefox and Chrome support using "native GL" experimentally as well.