The State of the GUI

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 12:43:52 UTC, drug wrote:
> very interesting, I thought about it but without details like 
> you

It's like solving climate change with ocean alcalinisation: it 
seems doable, but will require unnatural degrees of 
_collaboration_. Hence why it's difficult.


>> Every one of these packages can work without the others, and 
>> essentially is not so opinionated.
>> 
>> (Anything based on OpenGL would be hopeless I think. But 
>> anything GPU-based and not OpenGL need some kind of shader 
>> compiler which is also too much work. So I think for the 
>> purpose of practicality it can be left as an exercise)
>> 
> Why opengl based would be hopeless? Could you elaborate?


There is a host of reasons:

- Because every OpenGL driver is deeply broken. (i've been a 
professional OpenGL developer for years)

- Because if you properly abstract 3D rendering you come to 
something like bgfx, which is a multi man-years project in 
itself. Because bgfx is not a simple API but the 2D APIs are. If 
bgfx had a shader compiler embedded at runtime it will be a good 
solution, for now it's an offline tool hence coupling is huge.

- OpenGL does not "work everywhere". It's deprecated on macOS. In 
general portable APIs don't make any giant any money: the trend 
is fragmentation hence why abstraction over specific APIs is a 
must: that's where Unity was better than anyone else.