Man, that's so cool. When things became quiet around the GPU work and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit. That hope is back!
> and Alyssa said something along the lines of "we are very far away" I lost hope a bit.
I think the quote you're thinking of was a reference to modern OpenGL and Vulkan support, not accelerated graphics in general. Older OpenGL is a lot easier to implement, and sufficient for an accelerated desktop and games like Minecraft.
Marcan and Alyssa have been saying for a while that we were on track to get GPU acceleration in the near-ish future.
Vulkan is a lot more work to get to, with far fewer applications using it. It would be a worse ROI, and take significantly longer to make an OS that can be a daily driver for most people.
Not sure if OpenGL 4.0-4.6 is less work in general. I'd argue implementing Vulkan gives the best ROI, since it gives all OpenGL after that without extra effort.
And I don't think that few applications use it. Anything modern tries to. The rest are planning to move to it.
What common or high profile applications do you think actively target Vulkan? Outside of games very few do in my experience but I’d love to see some examples outside what I know of.
I believe, and I couldn't quickly find it in the docs, that Mesa provides certain OpenGL versions if you have implement certain OpenGLES version. For for example if you have OpenGLES3 you get OpenGL 3 for free via Mesa (These version numbers are made up, I don't actually know which OGL version can be implemented in terms of OGLES)
