The thing is, in its entire lifetime OpenGL was never meant to be a GPU abstraction layer - that only happened during GeForce2's time (and only for Nvidia). Even SGI's implementation was doing a lot of stuff on the CPU (and SGI even had a pure CPU implementation). OpenGL was always meant to be a high lever immediate graphics API (immediate here meaning as opposed to retained/scene graph APIs like OpenInventor).
> By the way, OpenGL still works on macOS 10.15. Deprecated does not mean it's not working.
Yeah but as it can clearly be seen, you cannot rely on Apple when it comes to keeping things working.
And I think it was a big failure not to adopt Iris Inventor as well.
Every OpenGL newbie has to go through the rite of passage of assembling their own SDK for dealing with fonts, textures, materials, math, meshes,...
Whereas all competing APIs provide such features out of the box on their SDKs, including the console ones.
Plus there is this myth about portability, when any relatively big OpenGL application is full of extensions and multiple code paths to deal with OEM specific features, driver bugs or hardware glitches.
Then there is the little issue that OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL are only superficially alike.
It seems to me then that OpenGL should have been a library instead of a driver all along. Its original intent unfortunately has no bearing on what it has become in the meantime.
> Yeah but as it can clearly be seen, you cannot rely on Apple when it comes to keeping things working.
Well yeah that's what deprecated means. At the moment, developers have a bit longer to get on with the times though, so that's nice I guess.
> should have been a library instead of a driver all along
This would have required there to be a lower-level interface that different vendors could all implement, which was not the case for early graphics hardware. In the decades since graphics hardware has all evolved to look more or less the same to SW (so vulkan became a nice fit), but that wasn't always the case.
The thing is, in its entire lifetime OpenGL was never meant to be a GPU abstraction layer - that only happened during GeForce2's time (and only for Nvidia). Even SGI's implementation was doing a lot of stuff on the CPU (and SGI even had a pure CPU implementation). OpenGL was always meant to be a high lever immediate graphics API (immediate here meaning as opposed to retained/scene graph APIs like OpenInventor).
> By the way, OpenGL still works on macOS 10.15. Deprecated does not mean it's not working.
Yeah but as it can clearly be seen, you cannot rely on Apple when it comes to keeping things working.