I don’t know if they hate the Khronos group, but they sure do seem to not care about them, or their standards. Pushing Metal, letting OpenCL languish, now this, it’s frustrating for people like me who have no time for learning multiple platform specific languages like these.

The only way I’m using any thing like this is through a tool or library or framework like Unreal Engine, where I just don’t have to care.

This is short term win long term loose, yes the platform specific programs look good now, but long run this stuff is going to be a negative as people look to avoid dealing with multiple platform specific frameworks.

I’m hoping the return of a proper Mac Pro is going to steer back against this trend. I’m reasonably confident that if third party gpu support is ok, then all of the work apple puts into optimisations on these Apple specific graphics languages is going to take a back seat, if NVidia are going to sell me a GPU for the Mac Pro, I’m confident that they care much more about CUDA than anything apple specific.

Considering that Apple is a Promoter Member of the Khronos Group, I doubt this.

They created OpenCL and supported OpenGL (ES) as the only graphics API on their platforms for years, but now they have dumped both open standards in favour of their own proprietary ones.

Actually they created Quickdraw 3D, and only adopted OpenGL as the NeXT team came onboard.

Although they created and gave OpenCL 1.0 to Khronos, they were not happy with the path that Khronos was taking it and their support basically stagnated on OpenCL 1.0.

As side note Google is yet to support OpenCL on Android, instead just like they did with their Android Java, they decided to create their own flavour, Renderscript, which isn't compatible with OpenCL.

As for OpenGL ES, I bet they only did it, as they were trying to "play pretend" being another kind of Apple as survival mechanism, nowadays they don't need it any longer.

Finally, Metal is one year older than Vulkan, offers a modern API instead of plain old C, and contrary to Khronos, just like other platform vendors, Apple understands the value of providing nice frameworks and debugging tools to go along an API.

> Apple understands the value of providing nice frameworks and debugging tools to go along an API.

You should have a look to pwcalton's Twitter feed if you want a quick overview of how nice the tools in questions are. Getting a kernel panic when running Xcode doesn't sound like “nice debugging tools” to me…

Better that not having none to start with.

They also then immediately dropped Quickdraw 3D like the hot garbage it was.

Thanks to NeXT people.

> [...] Metal is one year older than Vulkan [...]

Is it really though? Vulkan is based on AMD Mantle which AMD gave to Khronos. AMD Mantle (2013) predates Apple Metal (2014).

AMD gave Mantle to Khronos as they were going nowhere on their own.

When Apple released Metal, Mandle was still an AMD API.

> [Apple] only adopted OpenGL as the NeXT team came onboard.

I'm not talking about pre-NeXT Apple, that's ancient history.

Well, plenty of old Apple people are still around on their offices.

Many just don't realise how they were fooled to believe in the wolf in desguise.

Corporations do whatever to save themselves.

Do you think Microsoft will keep being FOSS champion, after they wipe out the board?

How naive are those that assign human behaviour to corporations.

And they consistently shipped obsolete 4-5 year old OpenGL versions on macOS.