MacOS 10.14 Mojave Reviewed
Like iOS 12 very promising overall from the sound of it, and a genuine step forward from previous years in the fundamentals of speed and stability just as they promised to work towards. One continuing (though not new at all to the release) disappointment I have with Apple though:<p>&gt;<i>The end of OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac</i><p>A solid summary of the situation, but to me where Apple really deserves blame there is not having MoltenGL and MoltenVK (and perhaps some theoretical MoltenCL too) as 1st party projects. I completely understand them wanting their own directly writable and controlled low level graphics language and having that be the interface layer. They are pretty vertically integrated and are now even doing their own GPUs, but even before that on the Mac they have long built the OS very strongly around GPU capabilities (for better and for worse, basic VM experience is very mediocre if you don&#x27;t have a hardware GPU to passthrough). If anything I&#x27;m mildly surprised in retrospect Metal wasn&#x27;t done earlier, OpenGL wasn&#x27;t working for them and it&#x27;s that big a deal. Microsoft invested in their own graphics layer for Windows ages earlier.<p>But controlling their own low level layer doesn&#x27;t mean that higher level non-proprietary interfaces shouldn&#x27;t still be supported on top. Part of the point should be to enable abstraction there. Apple is a big enough player and platform that this shouldn&#x27;t be a zero-sum game, and their perfectly understandable strategic concerns addressed by Metal don&#x27;t preclude OpenGL continuing to be officially supported as a layer on top of Metal. Apple could have even done it as another open source project of which they were the primary sponsor even if they wanted to manage it that way.<p>This may be just another symptom of their unusual startup-type culture which lets them hyperfocus on specific products but reduces their corporate ability to multitask, but it&#x27;s still a shame. It could have been just about supporting newer and better stuff going forward, not taking something away. Even if MolenVK&#x2F;MoltenGL ultimately fill some of that void I don&#x27;t think that should have been relegated to 3rd party only.