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Programming Apple Technology

Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 Mojave 269

In macOS 10.14 Mojave, which Apple unveiled on Monday, the company is deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL technologies in its desktop operating system. In an announcement post to developers, the company wrote: 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. PCGamer reports that several developers have expressed disappointment over the decision. AnandTech reports that the company is doing away with OpenGL and OpenCL in iOS and its other operating systems as well.
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Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 Mojave

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  • No doubt... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by x0ra ( 1249540 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:24PM (#56731902)
    Ignoring standards, enforcing proprietary interface... no doubt, Apple is the new Microsoft :-/
    • by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      It hurts. I started on early Macs and branched out to everything from them. Saw how elegant and capable they were before ever engaging in platform wars. I owned multiple older Mac workstations that were loaded with expansion capabilities. There were models with built in PCs on daughterboards for compatibility with the Wintel world. You could upgrade entire processor generations with expansion cards.
      The Macintosh was Rad as Fuck.
      Now I'm using Linux built in to my Windows and loving it, what happened to thi
      • by grub ( 11606 )
        Was that the PowerPC 6100? I had a PPC 6100/66 with the 486 card in it. I was able to upgrade the CPU to a fast 486DX just by swapping it in.

        Those were the days.
    • Re:No doubt... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @02:10PM (#56732660)

      Ignoring standards, enforcing proprietary interface... no doubt, Apple is the new Microsoft :-/

      Last nail in the coffin for the concept of Apple as engineering workstation. But that concept died long ago. Seriously, Apple will get hammered for this one, and not just by engineers. Dropping OpenGL is not an option, there is just too much code in the wild. OpenCL maybe, but I don't see Apple gaining any love for that either, quite the contrary. My take on it: Apple is setting itself up to eat crow a year down the road and humbly slither back into the Vulkan/OpenCL camp.

      The only one who gets hurt by this latest "your're holding your headphone jack wrong" blunder is Apple. Can't shed a tear.

      • My take on it: Apple is setting itself up to eat crow a year down the road and humbly slither back into the Vulkan/OpenCL camp.

        I would say developers are likely to target Vulkan via MoltenVK so they don't need to write Apple-specific code when Apple might simply abandon Metal anyway. Apple has had poor support for GPU acceleration even before Metal came out on the desktop, the latest supported version was OpenGL 4.1 in mid-2010 and Metal didn't come to Macs until 5 years later in mid-2015. Apple has never been very good at GPU support.

  • So now we have *THREE* "standards"?

    (insert profanity laden outburst reminiscent of Steve Martin's scene in Trains Planes and Automobiles when his rented car is stolen).

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:46PM (#56732068)

      Is OpenGL support *FINALLY* got good enough on linux to support both native and emulated software for the past 20 years... and now everybody is for ripping it all back out again before the fine polishing is done and replace it with something ELSE.

      This is why we never have nice things in the computer world. Nobody is willing to take a pause on the standards train and finish up something so it is verifiable, immutable, and secure, while working on the either the next iteration of the standard, or an entirely new standard experimentally while benefiting from the existence of the old stable one until the new standard at least reaches the same level of stability as the old one had when the new one was started. As a result we've got a nightmarish morass of half implemented and broke standards some of whose least documented corner cases cause software breakage that may be difficult or possible to infer in future bug fixing endeavors because the particular iteration of documentation or discussion of the bug in question no longer exists.

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        How can you pause and finish up the standards implementation when someone is juuuusssttt about to release a newer, better standard? Better giddyup and release the next iteration of the standard, don't finish the current one.

        I think most of the problem is the 90/10 rule. The last 10% takes 90% of the time and it's boring and uninteresting work that involves fixing bugs and making the hard to work bits work right.

        It's not nearly as interesting as dreaming about a new, better standard that's broader, more al

        • How can you pause and finish up the standards implementation when someone is juuuusssttt about to release a newer, better standard?

          OpenGL standardization is going just fine, the latest is 4.6 last August, now supporting Vulkan's intermediate shader code (SPIR-V) and a bunch of other goodies including improved parallelization. You don't want this for your next 3D shooter, but you do want it for a CAD system or to learn 3D graphics. Trust me, you do not want to start with Vulkan, which is pros-only zone.

    • Re:Oh, fuck.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:46PM (#56732076)

      No, we have one standard (OpenGL and subsequently Vulkan) and two proprietary implementations (DirectX and Metal).

      In Windows land, the only thing that is required to work (by Microsoft) is DirectX, but in practice the GPU vendors always have to support OpenGL and Vulkan.

      It may be possible that Apple is taking a similar stance (according to Microsoft in the strictest interpretation, neither OpenGL or Vulkan is 'supported' in Windows either, last I heard). I don't know if GPU driver vendors are going to be similarly empowered to bring Vulkan support regardless of the OS not doing so.

      • by mark-t ( 151149 )
        As I read it, they are actually deprecating the API's, which I would take to mean that while existing applications will continue to work, any (new) applications that utilize them will not pass the criteria for approval.
        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          Note that in the Windows case, the OS does not provide nor need it provide the APIs, the APIs are provided by the GPU vendor as part of it's 'driver' package (which also generally includes OpenGL libraries).

          Microsoft also deprecated the APIs, but that does not preclude third parties from stepping in to do what's required. At the time there was a great amount of fear and assumptions that it was going to kill off OpenGL, but in the end OpenGL carried on forever because it turned out there was a market for a

        • at some point they must also abondon the drivers or they will have to keep on maintaining their old OpenGL drivers for ages without "benefits". Anyway, any one sane will move to Vulkan and just use MoltenVK for the iOS and macOS ports. Don't know if there exists anything similar to make Vulkan work on DX12 but I would be surprised if there isn't.
        • Why do you need approval? On Windows at least (maybe the only good thing about it) is that you don't need Microsoft's permission to run your own software, libraries, drivers, etc.

          • by mark-t ( 151149 )
            We were talking about the mac, though.
          • Why do you need approval? On Windows at least (maybe the only good thing about it) is that you don't need Microsoft's permission to run your own software, libraries, drivers, etc.

            And you REALLY think that isn't true on macOS?

            • Well vendors supply support for OpenGL and Vulkan in their drivers for Windows, Apple restricts that which is why OpenGL support is stuck at the 2010 release (5 years before Metal was even available on MacOS) and why Vulkan is only available as an abstraction over Metal and not as a native driver library.

        • As I read it, they are actually deprecating the API's

          "Deprecating" does not mean "not supporting", it means "trying to scare developers'. They will succeed at that: developers will be scared away from Apple, more than they already are.

        • As I read it, they are actually deprecating the API's, which I would take to mean that while existing applications will continue to work, any (new) applications that utilize them will not pass the criteria for approval.

          Which only matters if you are selling them on the Mac App Store.

      • Re:Oh, fuck.... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Mordaximus ( 566304 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:05PM (#56732198)

        I imagine this has a lot to do with the announcement during the WWDC keynote that they are working on allowing iOS apps to run in macOS. That's far simpler if they stick with Metal and do away with Open GL.

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          If you are saying they won't support iOS OpenGL apps, that's one thing toward your hypothesis. It would not, however, make anything easier for iOS apps if macOS apps can't use OpenGL....

        • Re:Oh, fuck.... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:20PM (#56732294) Journal

          Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down

          0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system
          2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations.
          3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX.
          4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway.
          5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!

          Heck there isnt even a ??? step

          • You're implying that there are indeed iOS apps that are worth running on OSX. Evidence?

          • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @02:05PM (#56732620)

            Which should pretty much tell you that OSX is dead now. Apple is just figuring out the recipe for boiling the frogs slowly enough they don't know what is happening. Looks like they go it down

            0) Build a large library of applications in the locked down iOS eco system 2) Don't abandon but scale back the technical and QA investments in OSX just enough that people feel it across a few generations. 3) Choke out the MacOS ecosystem by making it complete with iOS apps that can now run on OSX. 4) Convince existing MacOS users to move to iOS devices because hey all your software is iOS apps now anyway. 5) Walled garden complete, semi open platform gone, most customers retained and locked in, profit!

            Heck there isnt even a ??? step

            There hasn't been a OS X release since 2016 when they changed the name to macOS and large portions of your rant apply to Windows+DirectX too. Neither of those two is dead yet so I think your predictions of the death of macOS (which is presumably what you meant) are somewhat premature. Personally I would have liked to see Apple go for Vulkan instead of pissing about with their own API but there is at least one compatibility layer, MoltenVK, so I'm not seeing any reason to go into a full-blown panic attack and twist my underpants up into a bunch. Besides, Apple has been known to do a 180 and it would not surprise me if they just decided out of the blue to switch to Vulkan at some point in time. Until then my (rather insubstantial) gaming needs are perfectly well served by macOS/iOS and if I ever feel the need to do any hardcore gaming I'll either buy a console or (Yuck, Yuck! and triple YUCK!) buy a Windows box for gaming.

          • Microsoft is doing their best to make Windows a platform people don't want to run to.
        • I imagine this has a lot to do with the announcement during the WWDC keynote that they are working on allowing iOS apps to run in macOS. That's far simpler if they stick with Metal and do away with Open GL.

          OpenGL already works on both.

          Going from Mac->iOS might be difficult if you didn't plan for it but going from iOS to Mac (ie. OpenGL ES to OpenGL) is easy.

        • Again you're getting this wrong. They said they were going to bring UIKit to macOS. That's all. The press is reporting on this like it's going to be some sort of magic thing that lets your iOS apps run on the Mac, oe that they're merging the operating systems, or that the Mac is going to have at touch interface. It's not that.

          There's two UI libraries in the Apple world. The Mac uses AppKit and iOS uses UIKit. They have similarities but they're different enough to be a challenge. The big overall thing is tha

    • So now we have *THREE* "standards"?

      Apple's pale imitation of Vulkan is not standard and never will be. What we have is, alienating developers and users at the same time. Good job.

  • by Zorro ( 15797 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:34PM (#56732008)

    https://xkcd.com/927/

    • That's not quite accurate: Developers can port games to from Macs to Windows? Ridiculous! We need those platform exclusives!

  • apple wants there own DirectX to bad mac don't have good video cards or cpus.

    And no the $5K imac pro with down clocked cpus does not count.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:46PM (#56732066)
    Thanks for throwing away the scientific community Apple. The penguin welcomes them with open arms. But at least Apple users have memojis.
    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:58PM (#56732562)

      Apple is doing a lot to help many scientific libraries adopt Metal instead of OpenGL, because it provides more modern GPU support and improves performance.

      Only on Slashdot could Apple helping give the scientific community performance gains with existing hardware be considered "throwing away the scientific community"

      Not to mention that Slashdot, a supposedly technical community, seems to have forgotten what "deprecate" even means. It's not like OpenGL is gone next year, it's still around and supported - it just means that something coming AFTER Mojave (so earliest, 2020) will drop OpenGL. It might even be after 2020...

  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:54PM (#56732120)

    At some point, apple bet big on OpenCL on the mac, even by rewriting big chuncks of the OS to use it. Anyone remembers grand central dispatch?

    But I guess they got tired of waititng for the standards bodies to deliver the functionality they needed, and just as they did with PCIe Solid state storage, they developed their own technology and went their separate way.

    Still, sad to see this happen, as going metal only (no OpenCL, no OpenGL and no Vulkan) means less games for my mac, and less support for a true multiplatform standard

    • Q) What does Microsoft embracing POSIX have in common in with Apple abandoning it?

      A) They're both signs of defeat.

    • Dispatch is still there, not sure what the concern is:

      https://developer.apple.com/do... [apple.com]

    • OpenCL really never took off though.

      CUDA was first, fast, and runs well on Linux -- the primary platform of GPGPU engineers. OpenCL, on the other hand, can run on slower AMD based video cards. Your OS choices are Windows (less supported by the open source community), Linux (less supported by AMD's video driver), or on macOS (unsupported by Apple's hardware who's flagship server was last updated by Steve Jobs [wikipedia.org].) And if you're going to use NVivida hardware anyway, you may as well use CUDA.

  • Apple seems to nibble to death it's karma it has with opinion leaders, i.e. us. This could spell trouble for projects like Blender and Xonotic. ... Could be that I might be staying away from new Apple hardware for good.

  • Period.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @01:20PM (#56732292)

    Has Apple given any hints on how this will impact WebGL support in Safari, Firefox, Chrome?

    • Mod parent +1 insightful.

      As a WebGL developer I'm curious about how this impacts support in the future as well.

      OpenGL ES and by extension, WebGL, are standardized across desktops, tablets, and SoC devices. While Metal is a good clean break from all the legacy baggage being locked into a proprietary API is not good for anyone.

  • ...the "news"... Everything is fu**ed up: what about a decent python version, decent bash version, tar version???? Good luck with that
  • Maybe it is time to consider that the relevance of Apple is not in the domain of apps for tablets and phones?
  • OpenGL and OpenCL.

    Legacy.

    This should be used as exhibit A any time someone tries to cast doubt over whether Apple have gone completely fucking batshit loco.

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