Slashdot Mirror
Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 Mojave
In macOS 10.14 Mojave, which Apple unveiled on Monday, the company is deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL technologies in its desktop operating system. In an announcement post to developers, the company wrote: Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders. PCGamer reports that several developers have expressed disappointment over the decision. AnandTech reports that the company is doing away with OpenGL and OpenCL in iOS and its other operating systems as well.
That is a known risk of developing for the Apple platform.
Which is also why Apple never got a serious foot hold in the enterprise market.
Any Mac Developer or Apple developer should know by now, they are one version away from a major rewrite.
While it does suck, it does help keep the software for the Mac current, and built for cross compatibility in mind, or at least with best practices.
Mac users don't often run into cases like we do in windows where someone running windows 10 and Office 95. Or that third party VB app built with hundreds of active X controls, that get unregistered on you randomly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I remember when Microsoft dropped OpenGL from the Windows platform. In practice, nothing changed as the GPU vendors kept providing OpenGL implementations anyway.
It just meant that MS was stopping the rather crappy job they were doing with OpenGL that the GPU vendors were already replacing anyway.
It being Apple, they could throw a bigger fit and forbid it, but at least it's possible that OS dropping support may mean nothing in practice.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
At some point, apple bet big on OpenCL on the mac, even by rewriting big chuncks of the OS to use it. Anyone remembers grand central dispatch?
But I guess they got tired of waititng for the standards bodies to deliver the functionality they needed, and just as they did with PCIe Solid state storage, they developed their own technology and went their separate way.
Still, sad to see this happen, as going metal only (no OpenCL, no OpenGL and no Vulkan) means less games for my mac, and less support for a true multiplatform standard
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
why Apple never got a serious foot hold in the enterprise market
But Apple did, and does, have a serious foothold in the creative industries, and deprecating OpenGL breaks display acceleration in After Effects and Premiere.
I imagine this has a lot to do with the announcement during the WWDC keynote that they are working on allowing iOS apps to run in macOS. That's far simpler if they stick with Metal and do away with Open GL.
Has Apple given any hints on how this will impact WebGL support in Safari, Firefox, Chrome?
Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down
0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system
2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations.
3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX.
4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway.
5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!
Heck there isnt even a ??? step
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Apple is doing a lot to help many scientific libraries adopt Metal instead of OpenGL, because it provides more modern GPU support and improves performance.
Only on Slashdot could Apple helping give the scientific community performance gains with existing hardware be considered "throwing away the scientific community"
Not to mention that Slashdot, a supposedly technical community, seems to have forgotten what "deprecate" even means. It's not like OpenGL is gone next year, it's still around and supported - it just means that something coming AFTER Mojave (so earliest, 2020) will drop OpenGL. It might even be after 2020...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ignoring standards, enforcing proprietary interface... no doubt, Apple is the new Microsoft :-/
Last nail in the coffin for the concept of Apple as engineering workstation. But that concept died long ago. Seriously, Apple will get hammered for this one, and not just by engineers. Dropping OpenGL is not an option, there is just too much code in the wild. OpenCL maybe, but I don't see Apple gaining any love for that either, quite the contrary. My take on it: Apple is setting itself up to eat crow a year down the road and humbly slither back into the Vulkan/OpenCL camp.
The only one who gets hurt by this latest "your're holding your headphone jack wrong" blunder is Apple. Can't shed a tear.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Apple got its tail kicked by Linux in the animation industry, others to follow. Tried Krita? It rules.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.