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I’m not sure about DX12, but my understanding is the Metal was put into production a good deal before there was even a working draft for Vulkan, which makes its

I’m not sure about DX12, but my understanding is the Metal was put into production a good deal before there was even a working draft for Vulkan, which makes its existence seem more driven by an immediate need to replace OpenGL ES. I suppose they could’ve dropped Metal right away after Vulkan became usable, but developers tend to get grouchy when APIs change out from under them that frequently. That said there’s no reason they couldn’t support Vulkan alongside Metal, likely with one being a first-party adapter layer for the other.

shmerl 5y ago
> developers tend to get grouchy when APIs change out from under them that frequently Apple didn't care about developers when they let OpenGL rot there, so I don't think it was ever a consideration for them. Their idea for developers is "we know better than you what's good for you". > That said there’s no reason they couldn’t support Vulkan alongside Metal Exactly, and the real reason is - they want their API to work as lock-in rather than allow developers to have options.
user-the-name 5y ago
Metal is also a far more usable API than Vulkan. Apple wants people to actually be able to implement things with their APIs.
- shmerl 5y ago
  Nothing (valid) stopped Apple from building such API on top of Vulkan and provide them alongside each other.
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    You believe that Apple should support two (three, if you count deprecated but still present OpenGL) different graphics APIs?
    - shmerl 5y ago
      They have more than enough resources to support anything. Such as lower level API (Vulkan) for those who need it and higher level one built on top of it for those who need something simpler but more limited. Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained in not being able to do that many times over?
      - my123 5y ago
        (disclaimer, I work at AWS) > Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained? Oh if only you knew... Yes we are very engineering constrained at those companies. Money doesn't replace the fact that there isn't enough people around who have the skills and are willing to work there at any price. And on top of that there's the opportunity costs of having them work on this instead of something else... When MoltenVK exists as a compatible Vulkan impl on top of Metal already, it's very hard to justify this.
        tibbetts 5y ago
        Opportunity cost is totally the analysis. Not just the developers, but the tech writing and support and product marketing and management oversight and continuity planning and support commitment. Building production software in a large organization is 10-50 times more expensive than a random open source hobby project. If you have a team to do that, is yet another graphics API really the best use of their time?
        tigen 5y ago
        > there isn't enough people around who have the skills and are willing to work there at any price I don't believe it. They could easily expand their hiring if they were sufficiently motivated. There is a combination of mismatched incentives at the team level and inefficient interviewing processes and requirements. It's often in the interest of employees to be inefficient in this regard.
      - Cyberdog 5y ago
        > Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained in not being able to do that many times over? Actually, yes. Let's say Apple has infinite dollars, which is true enough. Therefore they can afford to hire the 100 top graphics API developers in the world and put them to work on Metal. Now they decide they want to support Vulkan. But they can't go out and buy the 100 top graphics API developers anymore; those people are already working on Metal. They could get the next top 100 developers, but those people, as a rule, won't be quite as good as the people they already have working on Metal. Now I guess they could mix up the teams so that every other person in the top 100 working on Metal gets folded into the Vulkan team and vice versa and have two teams of roughly equal skill working on each. But then they don't have a super-team of the top 100 devs working on one project anymore. Now consider that Apple doesn't quite have infinite dollars, and that some top-level developers won't want to move to Cupertino or whatever else Apple may ask of them, and how do you even judge who the top 100 graphics API developers in the world are? Maybe, even for Apple, the best approach is to get the best developers you can hope to buy and keep all their attention on one project rather than splitting it up. All that said, yes, the ideal is that there would be some successor to OpenGL which enjoys the cross-platform support that it had. But as stated elsewhere in this thread, Metal was released years before Vulkan, so perhaps the onus for that is on those who have developed and adopted Vulkan instead of reaching out to Apple to expand Metal to other platforms (if that would have been acceptable; who knows, maybe they tried but Apple didn't allow it).

shmerl 5y ago

> developers tend to get grouchy when APIs change out from under them that frequently Apple didn't care about developers when they let OpenGL rot there, so I don't think it was ever a consideration for them. Their idea for developers is "we know better than you what's good for you". > That said there’s no reason they couldn’t support Vulkan alongside Metal Exactly, and the real reason is - they want their API to work as lock-in rather than allow developers to have options.

user-the-name 5y ago

Metal is also a far more usable API than Vulkan. Apple wants people to actually be able to implement things with their APIs.

shmerl 5y ago
Nothing (valid) stopped Apple from building such API on top of Vulkan and provide them alongside each other.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  You believe that Apple should support two (three, if you count deprecated but still present OpenGL) different graphics APIs?
  - shmerl 5y ago
    They have more than enough resources to support anything. Such as lower level API (Vulkan) for those who need it and higher level one built on top of it for those who need something simpler but more limited. Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained in not being able to do that many times over?
    - my123 5y ago
      (disclaimer, I work at AWS) > Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained? Oh if only you knew... Yes we are very engineering constrained at those companies. Money doesn't replace the fact that there isn't enough people around who have the skills and are willing to work there at any price. And on top of that there's the opportunity costs of having them work on this instead of something else... When MoltenVK exists as a compatible Vulkan impl on top of Metal already, it's very hard to justify this.
      - tibbetts 5y ago
        Opportunity cost is totally the analysis. Not just the developers, but the tech writing and support and product marketing and management oversight and continuity planning and support commitment. Building production software in a large organization is 10-50 times more expensive than a random open source hobby project. If you have a team to do that, is yet another graphics API really the best use of their time?
      - tigen 5y ago
        > there isn't enough people around who have the skills and are willing to work there at any price I don't believe it. They could easily expand their hiring if they were sufficiently motivated. There is a combination of mismatched incentives at the team level and inefficient interviewing processes and requirements. It's often in the interest of employees to be inefficient in this regard.
    - Cyberdog 5y ago
      > Do you believe Apple are somehow resource strained in not being able to do that many times over? Actually, yes. Let's say Apple has infinite dollars, which is true enough. Therefore they can afford to hire the 100 top graphics API developers in the world and put them to work on Metal. Now they decide they want to support Vulkan. But they can't go out and buy the 100 top graphics API developers anymore; those people are already working on Metal. They could get the next top 100 developers, but those people, as a rule, won't be quite as good as the people they already have working on Metal. Now I guess they could mix up the teams so that every other person in the top 100 working on Metal gets folded into the Vulkan team and vice versa and have two teams of roughly equal skill working on each. But then they don't have a super-team of the top 100 devs working on one project anymore. Now consider that Apple doesn't quite have infinite dollars, and that some top-level developers won't want to move to Cupertino or whatever else Apple may ask of them, and how do you even judge who the top 100 graphics API developers in the world are? Maybe, even for Apple, the best approach is to get the best developers you can hope to buy and keep all their attention on one project rather than splitting it up. All that said, yes, the ideal is that there would be some successor to OpenGL which enjoys the cross-platform support that it had. But as stated elsewhere in this thread, Metal was released years before Vulkan, so perhaps the onus for that is on those who have developed and adopted Vulkan instead of reaching out to Apple to expand Metal to other platforms (if that would have been acceptable; who knows, maybe they tried but Apple didn't allow it).