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by jhasse 2932 days ago
* Drop DirectX for Vulkan

* Drop MSVC for Clang or GCC

* Drop Edge for Firefox or Chromium

because they love open-source, right?

5 comments

Several key pieces of Edge are open source, such as Chakra Core, which is the JS engine (like Chromium's V8), and more are expected.

The argument IE6 was that the web grew too stagnant with a single dominant web renderer. If we all agree that the Web is a better place with multiple competing web renderers, why wish the death of the Edge renderer when it and Firefox are all that are standing in the way (and barely by latest metrics) of forks from the KHTML/WebKit/Blink family dominating?

Vulkan is just a 3D graphics and compute API, it cannot replace DirectX because it doesn't support most of the things DirectX does.

Did you mean to say Direct3D? That's still leave you with input, sound, maths, and 2D missing.

Yes, I meant Direct3D.
This is just ridiculous. The other points may/may not make sense but drop direct-x for vulkan? What? It'd have made more sense to make Direct-X open source than just dump it like it's useless. It's not like windows drivers for GPUs don't support vulkan. Direct-X has had a history of being the superior graphics API to OGL. Now, VULKAN evens things out a bit but just dumping so much of RnD for nothing doesn't make sense
> Direct-X has had a history of being the superior graphics API to OGL.

That view is fairly one-sided, to say the least. The history is presented in this StackExchange thread: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054....

But to summarize: OpenGL was the standard before D3D was created. D3D has been a step behind OpenGL in features and performance up to about D3Dv7. Then the OpenGL ARB screwed up, with Microsoft among the members (some hypothesize that Microsoft were attempting to sabotage OpenGL).

Compared to open-sourcing them? Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

* Direct3D being open-sourced would have removed the need for Vulkan.

* Many compilers are good for the ecosystem.

* Many browsers are good for the ecosystem.

Yes, let's have fewer choices for everything! That is sure to spur innovation!
There are a lot of situations where people don't have a choice but to use DirectX or MSVC. Same was true for Internet Explorer.

It's only a choice if we have open standards so you can actually choose between different implementations.