Graphics Library for D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>]

On Tuesday, 7 January 2014 at 13:18:51 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
wrote:
> The difference might be in that DX is huge framework, and 
> vendors effectively write small "core" for it.

I think this is all just a misunderstanding. Adam probably just 
meant that DX drivers are being updated automatically by 
Microsoft while you have to download the GL drivers yourself. But 
I never meant that the graphics library should expose GL-only 
functionality...

> With GL the balance could be the other way around, but GL 
> doesn't try to be all of the many facets of the multimedia in 
> the first place.
> (and now with DirectCompute I'm not even sure what DX wants to 
> be actually)

Yes, and I think this is a very good point for why the reference 
implementation should not be in DX. You risk ending up with all 
other platforms having to implement DX components that are not in 
GL (and there is a lot of them).

E.g. in GL you cannot do anything without writing your own 
shaders and there is no notion of 2D-anything… Many of the GL 
calls and parameters are actually also legacy calls so the REAL 
OpenGL ES API that you are likely to use is quite limited and 
bare bones.

Another reason I've already mentioned is to test feature 
coverage/performance on multiple platforms which only OpenGL ES 
enables.

Yet another reason is to allow/encourage as many as possible to 
dabble with the API early on to increase the usability of it. 
Which actually might be the most important aspect.