Where will D sit in the web service space?

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 13:56:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 July 2015 at 13:17:43 UTC, Paulo  Pinto wrote:
>> Apple has officially dropped OpenGL support at WWDC, if you 
>> care to watch the presentations and early release 
>> documentation.
>
> Are you sure they have _dropped_ OpenGL and not just got 
> switched away from using OpenGL as their low level layer for 
> Cocoa?
>
> https://developer.apple.com/opengl/
> https://developer.apple.com/opencl/

Those are the current information.

However if you watch "Graphics and Games" talks

https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/


It is all about Metal support, OpenGL being replaced by Metal and 
OpenGL being available for the iDevices that aren't Metal 
capable, as well as, backwards compatibility.


Then if you have a Mac developer account, you can check the "OS X 
El Capitan v10.11" document with zero references to OpenGL, other 
than Metal being the default render.

The OpenGL version support is still based on 4.1.

> https://developer.apple.com/metal/
>
>> They might change their mind and surprise the world, but that 
>> is how things stand.
>
> AFAIK they are on the Vulkan working group, but probably don't 
> view Vulkan as ready for consumption. They needed Metal on iOS 
> because GPUs on iPads/iPhones are weak. That happend before 
> Vulkan came along.

Sony is also and they don't use OpenGL, except for Android and 
WebGL on the PS4 dashboard.

>
> So it makes sense to move Metal to OS-X while waiting for 
> Vulkan to mature on their hardware (or rather waiting for older 
> GPUs to be irrelevant). They have a compatibility interest in 
> keeping developers on Metal until iPhones/iPads are ready for 
> Vulkan.


 From money point of view, I don't think it makes sense to spend 
one year paying developers to port Metal to OSX, replace OpenGL 
in OS X/iOS frameworks and developer tools, for doing the same 
again when Vulkan comes out.

>
>> So who cares if Intel, AMD, and Valve are heavily invested in 
>> Vulkan?
>
> Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and Imagination are all in on Vulkan, aren't 
> they?
>
> Everybody cares about what they do because they write the 
> drivers for next gen GPUs. It makes sense to focus 
> Vulkan-effort on next generation of hardware for vendors 
> (profit motive).

They also write drivers for DirectX and Metal.

>
> It is not at all obvious that Apple will want to keep writing 
> and maintaining their own low level drivers once GPU vendors 
> ship solid Vulkan implementations.
>
> Of course, Apple cannot tell the public that Metal will become 
> irrelevant in a few years... They have a story to sell.

According to the WWDC talks Apple also did engage with GPU 
vendors on Metal
for their systems, they aren't doing it alone.

Apple might prove me wrong, lets see.

--
Paulo