3 ms·

I would help the committee.

by jhasse 5y ago

klodolph 5y ago
Yes, and that's what they did. They were on the committee, helping out. Seems a lot of people have kind of rewritten the narrative here. Or maybe people forgot that committees & steering groups sometimes fall apart, slow to a crawl, or deliver standards that either aren't useful to developers or aren't feasible for implementers. You'd be a moron to put all your hopes and dreams in a committee / industry working group delivering something to fix the problems with your platform. Sending more engineers to a committee that's already moving slowly will just slow things down further. So these companies, while sitting on the committee, worked on alternatives and had backup strategies. Those strategies turned into Metal and DirectX 12, and the committee realized, "Oh, if we don't fix the problems with OpenGL, it will become completely irrelevant." So, in response to this new competition, the OpenGL steering committee started working on OpenGL Next, which later became Vulkan, and about two years later, got released. It's amazing what a little competition can do.
- shmerl 5y ago
  Still makes no sense. Vulkan exists. Where are Apple and MS now? They have no excuse not supporting it.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Why doesn't the excuse, "It costs more money to support multiple graphics APIs" make sense? Or how about, "Let's keep graphics APIs stable?"
    - shmerl 5y ago
      That doesn't make lock-in any better and less of a crooked practice. MS execs actually quite explicitly verbalized the idea of it in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_... This applies here very well too.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        Oh, I was really hoping that we were having a discussion about the historical reasons why Metal and DX12 exist. Complaining about how evil Apple and Microsoft are was fun and all in the 1990s when I was a kid hanging out on Slashdot, but I'm just kinda bored of it now.
        shmerl 5y ago
        Whitewashing lock-in doesn't make your arguments sound any more reasonable. It was bad in the '90s and it is bad today ;)

I would help the committee.

by jhasse 5y ago

I would help the committee.

Yes, and that's what they did. They were on the committee, helping out. Seems a lot of people have kind of rewritten the narrative here. Or maybe people forgot that committees & steering groups sometimes fall apart, slow to a crawl, or deliver standards that either aren't useful to developers or aren't feasible for implementers. You'd be a moron to put all your hopes and dreams in a committee / industry working group delivering something to fix the problems with your platform. Sending more engineers to a committee that's already moving slowly will just slow things down further. So these companies, while sitting on the committee, worked on alternatives and had backup strategies. Those strategies turned into Metal and DirectX 12, and the committee realized, "Oh, if we don't fix the problems with OpenGL, it will become completely irrelevant." So, in response to this new competition, the OpenGL steering committee started working on OpenGL Next, which later became Vulkan, and about two years later, got released. It's amazing what a little competition can do.

shmerl 5y ago
Still makes no sense. Vulkan exists. Where are Apple and MS now? They have no excuse not supporting it.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Why doesn't the excuse, "It costs more money to support multiple graphics APIs" make sense? Or how about, "Let's keep graphics APIs stable?"
  - shmerl 5y ago
    That doesn't make lock-in any better and less of a crooked practice. MS execs actually quite explicitly verbalized the idea of it in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_... This applies here very well too.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Oh, I was really hoping that we were having a discussion about the historical reasons why Metal and DX12 exist. Complaining about how evil Apple and Microsoft are was fun and all in the 1990s when I was a kid hanging out on Slashdot, but I'm just kinda bored of it now.
      - shmerl 5y ago
        Whitewashing lock-in doesn't make your arguments sound any more reasonable. It was bad in the '90s and it is bad today ;)