[Cieric]

> It's officially deprecated in favor of Vulkan

Can you provide a reference for this? I work in the GPU driver space (not on either of these apis), but from my understanding Vulkan wasn't meant to replace OpenGL, it was only introduced to give developers the chance at getting lower level in the hardware (still agnostic from the hardware, at least compared to compiling PTX/CUDA or against AMD's PAL directly, many still think they failed.) I would still highly advocate for developers using OpenGL or dx11 if their game/software doesn't need the capabilities of Vulkan or dx12. And even if you did, you might be able to get away with interop and do small parts with the lower api and leave everything else in the higher api.

I will admit I don't like the trend of all the fancy new features only getting introduced into Vulkan and dx12, but I'm not sure how to change that trend.

[jplusequalt]

I think Vulkan was originally called OpenGL Next. Furthermore, Vulkan's verbosity allows for a level of control of the graphics pipeline you simply can't have with OpenGL, on top of having built in support for things like dynamic rendering, bindless descriptors, push constants, etc.

Those are the main reasons IMO why most people say it's deprecated.

[ecshafer]

I only play with this stuff as a hobbiest. But OpenGL is way more simple than Vulkan I think. Vulkan is really really complicated to get some basic stuff going.

[marmarama]

Which is as-designed. Vulkan (and DX12, and Metal) is a much more low-level API, precisely because that's what professional 3D engine developers asked for.

Closer to the hardware, more control, fewer workarounds because the driver is doing something "clever" hidden behind the scenes. The tradeoff is greater complexity.

Mere mortals are supposed to use a game engine, or a scene graph library (e.g. VulkanSceneGraph), or stick with OpenGL for now.

The long-term future for OpenGL is to be implemented on top of Vulkan (specifically the Mesa Zink driver that the blog post author is the main developer of).

[flohofwoe]

> Can you provide a reference for this?

The last OpenGL release 4.6 was in 2017... I think that speaks for itself ;)

And at least on macOS, OpenGL is officially deprecated, stuck at 4.1 and is also quickly rotting (despite running on top of Metal now - but I don't think anybody at Apple is doing serious maintenance work on their OpenGL implementation).

[fulafel]

That's not "OpenGL is officially deprecated".

[josefx]

> but I don't think anybody at Apple is doing serious maintenance work on their OpenGL implementation

In other words nothing changed. The OpengGL standard had been well past 4.1 for years when Apple released Metal. People working with various 3D tools had to disable system integrity checks to install working drivers from NVIDIA to replace whatever Apple shipped by default.

[aj_hackman]

I've never been able to successfully create a GL context > version 2.1, or invoke the GLSL compiler.

As a sidenote, I've very much enjoyed your blog, and developed a similar handle system as yours around the same time. Mine uses 32 bits though - 15 for index, 1 for misc stuff, 8 for random key, and 8 for object type :^)

[aj_hackman]

The universal narrative around OpenGL is that it's deprecated, so I assumed that came with a thumbs-up from Khronos. In any case, I'm not holding my breath for GL > 4.6.