[andybak]

To be fair - OpenGL was fairly horrible to use directly. It sat in an awkward middle area between "low level enough to be efficient" and "high level enough to be productive".

Maybe I'm biased - every time I looked at OpenGl code I shuddered and ran away to a higher level framework (I'm excluding shader code from this - that's concise enough for me not to mind getting that close to the metal)

[nteu0893nt4ue]

So much this! I've been writing OpenGL code on a daily basis for the past 10 years, and I hate it. It works like an API designed in the 1970s. It uses none of the modern features of languages, easily allowing you to pass incorrect data to a function, and giving you almost no clue what, if anything, went wrong. Just look on StackOverflow some time at how many questions are basically, "My previously working OpenGL program is now rendering nothing but a black screen. What went wrong?" And then compare the huge number of different causes. There's no reason they couldn't have improved it along the way, keeping backwards compatibility, and just adding more informative error codes and better use of language features. But they didn't. My feeling is "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."