5 March Will Be A Very Exciting Day For Next-Gen OpenGL

[Ancurio]

I'm not completely sure what you mean by development tools, but I certainly agree with the importance of quality implementations. I would argue we don't necessarily need development "tools", but rather a clean small API, good documentation and quality tutorials. In order to get started with OpenGL developers need an interface towards the window system. Variants of glut is totally useless, SDL is bloat and sometimes out of date, glfw is pretty decent, etc., or developers have to write their own. Most tutorials around the web for OpenGL also utilizes deprecated OpenGL features. People need seek a while to find some half-decent OpenGL 3-4 tutorials without too much mess and third-party dependencies.

Do you not know about PIX? It's a pretty big reason Direct3D is so popular. There is no comparative tool for OpenGL right now. When Valve first started working with OpenGL, the first thing they lamented was a good graphics tracer/profiler/debugger, and since nothing came close to what they were used on Windows, they were forced to write their own.

Make no mistake, tooling is a BIG part of how well a graphics API does.

[aliquis]

AMD pulled of Mantle in a relatively short amount of time and that was proven effective enough to make MS, Khronos, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, and many game companies to work on new APIs. I think Mantle was written from the ground up, but I might be wrong about that.

Joke: AMD felt it was easier to write their own graphics API than to fix their OpenGL drivers? ;D

[vein]

You don't need a big IDE for code completion. Sublime does this very well, Vim and Gedit have plugins just to mention a few. Developers may use whatever they prefer, but when it comes to code completion, auto-indenting, static analysis etc., it has nothing to do with OpenGL or "glNext". I'm not telling people to stop using IDEs, I'm saying Khronos should focus on creating the ultimate API. IDE developers or other third parties can then focus on integrating it to their respective IDE.

As pointed out earlier, there is no superior cross-platform IDE, so which IDE should Khronos focus on then? Don't say Eclipse; it's the biggest pile of bloatware of them all.

BTW, if you are using git, no IDE can beat it in a terminal.

I agree with you completely, Khronos should focus on doing a great API not any IDE... that should be left to third parties.
But as for a superior cross-platform IDE... My tip is to use Code:Blocks, it is cross-platform and it has very nice features (For example, I love the Breakpoint counters).

[mike4]

Never managed to debug with codeblocks some years ago. Maybe I should look into it again? I've used Eclipse without problems (win/osx86/ubuntu) although it has a big ram footstep.

[smitty3268]

Joke: AMD felt it was easier to write their own graphics API than to fix their OpenGL drivers? ;D

Not necessarily a joke. From what I've heard their GL codebase is a giant mess and no one working there really understands it.

Starting from a clean slate and not having to worry about every change regressing some important CAD program could be pretty helpful for them.

[Luke_Wolf]

Not necessarily a joke. From what I've heard their GL codebase is a giant mess and no one working there really understands it.

Starting from a clean slate and not having to worry about every change regressing some important CAD program could be pretty helpful for them.

Sounds like the point of their work on Mesa and Gallium to me.