Apple Proposing A New, Lower-Level Graphics API For The Web

[nemequ]

None. They started Clang which uses LLVM. They do support OpenCL (as much as they do OpenGL AFAIK).

I know LLVM was a University of Illinois project, and WebKit is a fork of KHTML, but who is to blame for OpenCL? Wikipedia says Apple started OpenCL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#History), though that's hardly irrefutable evidence…

[microcode]

"A technology that does not follow a single native API, which reduces the difficulty of implementation on platforms that do not support the chosen native API,"
"does not follow a single native API," -> forsakes Vulkan
"which reduces the difficulty of implementation" -> to compromise on behalf of
"platforms that do not support the chosen API" -> Apple
Wow, what a crazy way to say "Because we're stubborn and unlike everyone else we will not enable Vulkan, you all have to bear the costs of our selfishness.".

As a web developer, a consumer, and a realtime graphics developer, I am always surprised with the depths Apple is willing to sink to. Personally I hope they get rejected outright until they commit to native platform standards.

[microcode]

Started an issue thread regarding this on the GitHub (where they suggest discussion should happen) if anyone wants to chime in.

https://github.com/gpuweb/admin/issues/1

[Brophen]

The Web is one area that forces Apple to the table, make it count

[boxie]

I will just leave this here, seems appropriate

[linuxgeex]

"does not follow a single native API," -> forsakes Vulkan

Actually, it does not. All it says is that Vulkan is not the standard they are pushing to be adopted. They open by saying they want the standard to be inclusive of multiple APIs. I agree that it is poorly worded.

[sarmad]

When it comes to standards, I don't think Apple deserves the community's attention.

[linuxgeex]

I will just leave this here, seems appropriate

Nice.

What works though is when a new standard is implemented as a shim over several other standards so that developers can work with a single API while leveraging several other standards without having to learn them. Think SDL. SDL isn't a new competing standard. It is inclusive of many, it allows low-level operations, and it is cross-platform. I think that is what Apple is proposing, but I think their wording is very easy to misunderstand... and coming from Apple, it's easy to want to misunderstand, lol

[juno]

What kind of fools are they, thinking anyone is going to buy this shit? They are the only reason we don't have one single explicit graphics API for all the platforms.

[Delgarde]

Apart from that, why do we need a new API? What is the problem with simply reusing Vulkan?

To quote from the linked article:

The major platform technologies in this space are Direct3D 12 from Microsoft, Metal from Apple, and Vulkan from the Khronos Group. While these technologies have similar design concepts, unfortunately none are available across all platforms.

What they're notably *not* saying is that Vulkan does have pretty good cross-platform support, and the one major platform not supporting it is Apple... the same Apple who are proposing this new API instead of just doing a web-adaptation of Vulkan.