Comment by fps-hero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fps-hero | Hacker News Reader

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WebGL2 already has a compatibility layer to make it work on macOS. macOS is stuck on the 2010 vintage OpenGL 4.1 which predates even OpenGL ES 3.x on which WebGL2 is based. They use the ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) from the Android project with a metal based backend.

Which kind of hints towards the fact that they could definitely have supported OpenGL in a way that project like MoltenVK work. The OpenGL standard is frozen in time, last update was in 2017. It's not too late.

The decision not so support modern OpenGL is why so much engineering/3D/CAD/gaming software is suck on the windows platform. There is no true cross-platform graphics standard anymore. WebGPU might be our last hope.

ANGLE is also used by Chrome and Firefox for WebGL2. It includes a translation layer from WebGL2 to Metal.

The decision not to support OpenGL is probably because the API isn’t actually very modern and requires the driver to reconstruct what the user code wants. The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.

The same way neither PlayStation nor XBox support it, and Switch does support it, thanks to Android pedigree von Tegra, but the main API with all the goodies is NVN.

In any case, most game studios don't care, because Render-Hardware-Interface (RHI) is a thing since the home computing revolution.

> The decision not to support Vulkan however is most likely a political decision.

The only platform where running WebGL on top of Vulkan would make sense is Linux, and on Linux both the GL and Vulkan drivers are in good shape via the MESA project (e.g. there's little incentive to switch from a perfectly fine OpenGL driver to Vulkan for implementing WebGL), especially since the only outlier (NVIDIA) doesn't have all that great 'native' Vulkan support either (IME at least).

> WebGL2 already has a compatibility layer to make it work on macOS

...and also on Windows (where WebGL runs on top of D3D). AFAIK Linux is the only platform where browsers actually use OpenGL to implement WebGL.

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