[SubjectToChange]

It really bothers me that we're deprecating OpenGL and replacing it with something that's ridiculously hard to do anything simple

OpenGL is only deprecated on MacOS, AFAIK, it will exist for many years to come.

I'm sure Vulkan is better in some regards but is simply not feasible to expect someone to learn it quickly.

Vulkan is often said to be more of a “GPU API” than a high level graphics API. With that in mind, the complexity of Vulkan is not surprising. It’s just a difficult domain.

Like, imagine the newest Intel/ARM/AMD chips came along and instead of being able to write C or C++, you're being told "We are dropping support for higher level languages so you can only write assembly on this now and it'll be faster because you have more control!" It would be correctly labeled as ridiculous.

IMO, it’s more like single threaded C/C++ vs multithreaded C/C++ programming. There is a massive increase in complexity and if you don’t know what you are doing, it’ll blow up in your face and/or give you worse performance. However, it’s the only practical path forward.

Anyway, OpenGL can basically be implemented on top of Vulkan. Perhaps it is regrettable that the OpenGL standard is no longer being actively developed, but nothing lasts forever.

[flohofwoe]

> OpenGL is only deprecated on MacOS, AFAIK, it will exist for many years to come.

It's abandondend by Khronos and GPU vendors, which is pretty much the same thing as deprecated unfortunately.

[eliasdaler]

By the way, here's an interesting post by Mike Blumenkrantz (Valve): https://www.supergoodcode.com/manifesto/

Most of it is satire, but it's interesting that the position of "Chair of OpenGL" still exists to this day and a new person was assigned to it in 2024.

[tombert]

Everything you said is fine, and I'm ok with OpenGL being killed/downplayed/deprecated.

What I would have really preferred is Apple releasing Metal as a standard that anyone could use. Metal is a pretty nice API that's fairly fun and easy to use. I feel like if we need a "next gen" version of a graphics API, I would have had Vulkan for super low-level stuff, and Metal or DirectX for higher-level stuff.

[flohofwoe]

WebGPU is mostly very similar to Metal (except for a couple of overly 'rigid' parts which are mostly inherited from Vulkan - most importantly the resource binding via BindGroups and all-in-one PSOs).

Also, Metal isn't generally a high-level API, it has low-level features which are pretty much like Vulkan or D3D12, you just don't need to use those low level features if not needed.