Autodesk Drops Support For Alias, VRED In macOS Mojave Over OpenGL Deprecation (appleinsider.com)
"Autodesk has published a support document announcing that it is stopping development of its Alias and VRED vertical market packages, and that older versions will not work on Mojave due to Apple's OpenGL deprecation," writes Stephen Silver for Apple Insider. Alias is software predominantly used in automotive design and industrial design, while VRED is 3D visualization software. From the report: According to a note posted on Autodesk's support website, while older Alias versions can run on High Sierra or earlier, "no versions of VRED will run on that operating system due to the OpenGL deprecation." The change, according to the Autodesk note, "allows Autodesk development teams to focus on bringing innovations to market faster, and allows for more frequent software updates." "In the end, the entire Alias and VRED community will benefit from this streamlined approach," wrote the company.
This follows the announcement by Apple in June at WWDC that Mojave will require graphics hardware to support Metal, and that active development has ceased for OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac. It isn't clear why Autodesk made the declaration that OpenGL's deprecation was responsible for the applications not working in Mojave. Deprecation does not mean removed, and the existing OpenGL implementation in High Sierra remains in Mojave. The move at present does not appear to affect the core AutoDesk product.
This follows the announcement by Apple in June at WWDC that Mojave will require graphics hardware to support Metal, and that active development has ceased for OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac. It isn't clear why Autodesk made the declaration that OpenGL's deprecation was responsible for the applications not working in Mojave. Deprecation does not mean removed, and the existing OpenGL implementation in High Sierra remains in Mojave. The move at present does not appear to affect the core AutoDesk product.
Apple should have some sort of a system where the GPU drivers can install their own OpenGL stack, similar to the ICD in Windows.
It boggles my mind how much money that company has and how poorly written OS X seems to not be able to do the things Windows has been able to do for a decade or more. I'm surprised Autodesk didn't just drop support for OS X entirely and tell Apple to piss off. They actually deserve it this time, especially considering what a clusterfuck Metal 2 is (and it still doesn't support everything OpenGL 4.5 does- nor will it ever, according to Apple- nice mobile API you back ported to the desktop there).
From what I understand about OpenGL, I don't think Khronos is really advancing it either. They are mainly focused in developing Vulkan. From what I can see OpenGL has been getting minor tweaks for years. I would say it is telling Khronos could have made OpenGL more advanced but opted to write an entire API from scratch instead. So why didn't Apple use Vulkan instead? The main reason I think was that Apple couldn't wait for Vulkan as Metal was released 18 months before Khronos released the Vulkan spec much less a working implementation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Really, no one is using Apple for high-end CAD anymore because the hardware sucks.
The reason they abandoned gcc is because of the GPL. Intellisense-like features required the code parser from the compiler to be integrated into the IDE, the GPL didn't allow that without making XCode free software which Apple didn't want to do so having a modern closed-source IDE required a compatible (licensed) compiler.
I thought the distinction between 'free of charge' and 'free of restriction' in the use of the term 'free software' in this context was obvious since the GPL does not stipulate that GPL-licensed software or derivative works must be free of charge. I guess that distinction was lost on you so to clarify: "...the GPL didn't allow that without making XCode free software...".