[hoorayimhelping]

GL was written in the early 90s with a late 80s / early 90s programming context in mind. It's essentially a giant state machine with some limited programmability bolted on in later additions. It feels really clunky compared to modern frameworks.

I think anyone interested in it should find a basic WebGL tutorial and render some triangles and cubes with vertex coloring and some texture mapping to see how it's done in WebGL and to see how tedious it can be. Having to change a lot of different pieces of state every render call to do what seems like very basic things (is there anything more basic than rendering a triangle?) gets old quick.

[pjmlp]

Except almost all major APIs, even from those days (e.g. Glide, QuickDraw 3D, Warp3D) used structs to contain state, instead of a global state machine.

Had not been for miniGL and Quake, and GL would have had other relevance in history.