Love on Mac w/o OpenGL

[hlship]

Apparently, Apple is deprecated OpenGL to force developers to move towards Metal. How will that affect Love2d in the medium and long term?

[MrFariator]

The post for the uninitiated: https://developer.apple.com/macos/whats-new/

Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

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.

Metal is designed from the ground up to provide the best access to the modern GPUs on iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. Metal avoids the overhead inherent in legacy technologies and exposes the latest graphics processing functionality. Unified support for graphics and compute in Metal lets your apps efficiently utilize the latest rendering techniques. For information about developing apps and games using Metal, see the developer documentation for Metal, Metal Performance Shaders, and MetalKit. For information about migrating OpenGL code to Metal, see Mixing Metal and OpenGL Rendering in a View.

[Pebsie]

Damn Apple really are moving things fast and hard. This bothers me greatly, but we do need to start moving away from OpenGL.
I hope that LÖVE can get through this

[grump]

Apple making the walls higher around their garden again.

[slime]

Apparently, Apple is deprecated OpenGL to force developers to move towards Metal. How will that affect Love2d in the medium and long term?

Medium-longish term, not at all. Apple formally deprecated legacy OpenGL on macOS like 5 years ago, but it still works. I expect Core Profile OpenGL will continue to work for several years.

The plan for the past few years has always been to make a Metal backend for love, since it's superior to OpenGL in terms of performance and features - and even superior in terms of ease of use and API friendliness compared to OpenGL in many respects, unlike Vulkan. Work done towards a Metal backend may benefit future hypothetical Vulkan, Direct3D 12, etc. backends as well since their fundamental designs are similar.

The fact that Apple is formally deprecating OpenGL means it makes more sense to invest time into a Metal port than otherwise - but OpenGL on macOS has effectively been soft-deprecated for many years already, so it's not a surprising turn of events at all.

[Jasoco]

Apple making the walls higher around their garden again.

Metal is technically much better than OpenGL in all aspects so it has nothing with a "walled garden". It's about performance.

I look forward to a Metal version of Löve eventually.

I just wonder how long it's gonna take before they remove it completely and how its gonna affect the games I already have that will definitely never get updates for Metal. Hopefully by then I have a gaming PC to connect to my TV anyway so I won't even care.

[grump]

Apple making the walls higher around their garden again.

Metal is technically much better than OpenGL in all aspects so it has nothing with a "walled garden". It's about performance.

They're removing support for a widely used open standard API and replace it with a proprietary one, making it much harder for developers to port their games. No official support for Vulkan either. Apple is all about building walled gardens.

[raidho36]

And it works to their advantage spectacularly. Removing support for a legacy API means nobody will be able to use the obsolte, bloated and underperforming functionality, they'll have no choice but to upgrade. Having app store quality control also helps immensely in general.
That said, they produce nothing but pathetic excuse for a hardware, for that reason I'd never own an Apple product.

[mikeisinlove]

Apple making the walls higher around their garden again.

Metal is technically much better than OpenGL in all aspects so it has nothing with a "walled garden". It's about performance.

They're removing support for a widely used open standard API and replace it with a proprietary one, making it much harder for developers to port their games. No official support for Vulkan either. Apple is all about building walled gardens.

So you don't consider DirectX a walled garden?

[grump]

Apple is all about building walled gardens.

So you don't consider DirectX a walled garden?

That's merely a brick in the wall of the Xbox ecosystem, just like Metal will become one on Apple's devices. There's more to the "walled garden" analogy than the non-availabilty of an open/cross-platform API.