[skohan]

Apple's developer hostile in general.

They create a narrow space where it's possible to make money developing for their platform, but there's a huge risk that:

a) they will make a decision which makes your product no longer viable, or

b) they will decide to replicate your product as a 1st party offering and render you redundant (e.g. tile)

Adopting open standards like Vulkan would be the single best thing they could do to support games on their platform. Games are extremely high-investment, and having to develop against a second back-end like Metal is a perfect reason not to support a platform.

Apple's friendly to developers as long as they are willing to stay on the reservation, but there is no reward for doing so.

[ykafia]

I might be wrong but from what i read on the internet, MacOS don't provide direct access to GPUs, you have to go through the OS GPU API to do your GPU computation. On Windows and Linux, there is no abstraction, OpenGL and Vulkan access the GPUs directly. I'd say it's safer to go the MacOS way but it's a bother for those who want a unified API

[pjmlp]

You are wrong, there is no way to access the GPU directly unless you are the driver author.

[pjmlp]

Producing development tooling unmatched by FOSS is anything but hostile.

Want success with "developers friendly" tools? Try to make a business of using Khronos APIs in GNU/Linux games.

Ask Loki how well did it go.

As for Vulkan it is just the same design by committee extension spaghetti soup that killed OpenGL, just with even more boilerplate.

[skohan]

Doom 2016/Eternal shipped with Vulkan and they are two of the best optimized games ever made.

I don't buy that Vulkan is not a first-class choice for graphics. To the extent that it has issues, it's only because of (developer hostile) lack of support from major software vendors.

[pjmlp]

Pity that outside Android 10+ and a couple to Swift ports, most AAA studios don't care.

Now that Microsoft owns Doom, let's see how long it holds its Vulkan implementation.

[skohan]

I don't see what this has to do with your argument

[pjmlp]

Just like yours doesn't.

[skohan]

Mine does.

> skohan: failing to support open standards is not developer friendly

> pjmlp: closed standards are developer friendly, because Vulkan is inadequate.

> skohan: Vulkan is provably adequate

> pjmlp: Microsoft will use its cash advantage to prevent the successful use of open standards, and is therefore developer friendly???