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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.
Ignoring standards, enforcing proprietary interface... no doubt, Apple is the new Microsoft :-/
I guess Apple doesn't want to play with others?
You just noticed that?
https://xkcd.com/927/
Thanks for throwing away the scientific community Apple. The penguin welcomes them with open arms. But at least Apple users have memojis.
Is OpenGL support *FINALLY* got good enough on linux to support both native and emulated software for the past 20 years... and now everybody is for ripping it all back out again before the fine polishing is done and replace it with something ELSE.
This is why we never have nice things in the computer world. Nobody is willing to take a pause on the standards train and finish up something so it is verifiable, immutable, and secure, while working on the either the next iteration of the standard, or an entirely new standard experimentally while benefiting from the existence of the old stable one until the new standard at least reaches the same level of stability as the old one had when the new one was started. As a result we've got a nightmarish morass of half implemented and broke standards some of whose least documented corner cases cause software breakage that may be difficult or possible to infer in future bug fixing endeavors because the particular iteration of documentation or discussion of the bug in question no longer exists.
No, we have one standard (OpenGL and subsequently Vulkan) and two proprietary implementations (DirectX and Metal).
In Windows land, the only thing that is required to work (by Microsoft) is DirectX, but in practice the GPU vendors always have to support OpenGL and Vulkan.
It may be possible that Apple is taking a similar stance (according to Microsoft in the strictest interpretation, neither OpenGL or Vulkan is 'supported' in Windows either, last I heard). I don't know if GPU driver vendors are going to be similarly empowered to bring Vulkan support regardless of the OS not doing so.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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!
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
Again you're getting this wrong. They said they were going to bring UIKit to macOS. That's all. The press is reporting on this like it's going to be some sort of magic thing that lets your iOS apps run on the Mac, oe that they're merging the operating systems, or that the Mac is going to have at touch interface. It's not that.
There's two UI libraries in the Apple world. The Mac uses AppKit and iOS uses UIKit. They have similarities but they're different enough to be a challenge. The big overall thing is that AppKit is much older than UIKit which makes sense as the Mac is older than the iPhone. It's been said that to some extent UIKit is what AppKit would be if they started over on it today and were able to use all of the stuff they've learned over the years, which is basically exactly the situation they were in when making the iPhone.
So for example, let's say you have an iOS app and you have a screen where you need a text view. Like, it's a box with text in it and if it needs to, it can scroll if you have too much text in it. You can make it read-only or editable. So you drag a UITextView onto the screen and you're most of the way there. It has a text property and you set that to be what the text is, either in the designer or in the code. You can specify if it's editable, scrollable, etc. in the same way.
Now let's say you want to do that same thing on the Mac. You have a form and you drag an NSTextView control onto it. It has the same name except for the first two letters because Apple's naming convention (at least in the Objective-C era) is to have the first 2-3 letters be uppercase and the rest be descriptive. UI stands for UIKit. The NS? That stands for NEXTSTEP (that's really the name in all caps like that), because macOS is derived from what used to be NEXTSTEP, which was the OS from the company Steve Jobs started when Apple gave him the boot. Yeah.
OK so UITextView vs. NSTextView. Simple enough, right? Well not quite. See, when you drag that onto the form you'll notice that it's an NSTextView embedded in an NSClipView, and then that's embedded in an NSScrollView along with two NSScroller objects for the scrollbars. So everything involved in this equation gets its own separate object and so you have to remember to specify the text in the NSTextView but the scrolling in the NSScrollView. And I'm not sure what the NSClipView does other than just provide a window into whatever part of the view the NSTextView is visible.
Basically at some point they realized everyone wanted to work with the one object and have it handle all the stuff like scrolling and scrollbars itself. And this is one simple example. But it means that it's not quite as simple as writing some library that says "if Mac then NSTextView else UITextView", although some have tried. In fact apparently Apple has a library of their own called UXKit that basically does that but it's not available for use yet.
Schnapple
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
There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS and large portions of your rant apply to Windows+DirectX too. Neither of those two is dead yet so I think your predictions of the death of macOS (which is presumably what you meant) are somewhat premature. Personally I would have liked to see Apple go for Vulkan instead of pissing about with their own API but there is at least one compatibility layer, MoltenVK, so I'm not seeing any reason to go into a full-blown panic attack and twist my underpants up into a bunch. Besides, Apple has been known to do a 180 and it would not surprise me if they just decided out of the blue to switch to Vulkan at some point in time. Until then my (rather insubstantial) gaming needs are perfectly well served by macOS/iOS and if I ever feel the need to do any hardcore gaming I'll either buy a console or (Yuck, Yuck! and triple YUCK!) buy a Windows box for gaming.
uhh, like, as compared to OpenGL..
Now look at their OSX revenues.
Metal came before Vulcan retard.
Apple cultist much? Shows.
Mantle came before Vulkan. Mantle came before Metal. Apple knew that the Vulcan standard was in development and idiotically forked Metal from it. Vulcan is a standard, Metal is not. Metal is just a piece of proprietary crap, that does not have the broad, consistent feature set of Vulkan and does not have the developer mind share or the application base. Mantle will descend further into crapland while Vulkan goes on to new amazing achievements. (Have you seen the demos? Have you seen the shipping games? Can you spell "Doom"? Heh.)
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Metal was in development for several years before its first release in 2014
Exhibit A: AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013
Exhibit B: Metal has been available since June 2, 2014
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.