Re: please sign for not delete the opengl from next release of windows

jukka@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
I don't think the end users care very much at all
*which* API or what technology is running under the hood


Rephrase that as "Windows users don't care..."

Currently IHV's are locked in a situation where they have to implement
OpenGL, Direct3D, GDI all in their drivers. Looks to me, if not
mistaken, that with Vista model they only need to implement one single
"backend", so to speak. If can ONLY lead to more stable and robust
drivers. This is a Good Thing for the consumers and Windows. In this
regard.


But bad for everybody else.

The Bad Thing is that some OpenGL developers have to deal with it one
way or other.. migrate to other platforms, if that is possible.. 

I can make my app work on either API, no problem
(in fact I was planning to do it).


Writing DirectX code is mostly extra complexity if their applications
are portable to wider range of platforms, so then they have to have
both OpenGL and DirectX rendering backends.


....apart from one thing - shaders. The shading
languages are incompatible so you need two versions
of all shaders.

The best response to this mess would be to make
Direct3D shaders work in OpenGL, either at the
driver level (please!) or via a translator. This
would make porting easy.

What this means in practical terms, is that the layer would in practise
expose D3D rendering context (IDirect3DDevice10 ?) in different form. I
don't know how NV or ATI do things now, but it would make sense to
assume that they share as much microcode as possible between D3D and GL


No, there will be a library to map OpenGL 1.4 to
Direct3D. No VBOs, no shaders, nothing which will
make OpenGL useful except to CAD programs (this is
the whole idea - Microsoft needs those expensive
CAD programs to keep working otherwise it wouldn't
even be doing this much for OpenGL).

Heck, it would be interesting to work on driver which does D3D and GL
with same backend and engineer efficient frontend which feeds from both
formats of API.


Except it won't work that way. Microsoft appears
to be actively blocking it. The Window compositor
could work perfectly well with both APIs (all it's
really doing is copying framebuffers around, it
doesn't care how the framebuffer is produced) but
it isn't going to. It detects OpenGL and works
differently when it finds it.



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that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,'
and then they actually change their minds and you never
hear that old view from them again.  They really do it.
It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists
are human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens
every day.  I cannot recall the last time something like
that happened in politics or religion.

- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

.

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