In the end, if nobody is maintaining the OpenGL standard, implementations and tooling it doesn't matter much whether it is officially deprecated or just abandondend.
.. but people ARE maintaining the implementations and tooling even if the spec might not be getting new features aside from extensions. There's a difference.
> A slow moving graphics API is a good thing for many uses.
It's not slow moving. It's completely frozen.
The Mesa guys are the only ones actually fixing bugs and improving implementations, but the spec is completely frozen and unmaintained. Apple, Microsoft and Google don't really care if OpenGL works well on their platforms.
Well, not really to the OpenGL spec itself. It's about a new OpenGL extension being added to the extension registry. Vendors may implement it if they wish. AFAIK the core OpenGL spec hasn't been updated in years, so even though new extensions keep getting developed by vendors, the official baseline hasn't moved.
I suppose the same is true of Direct3D 11, though. Only the Direct3D 12 spec has been updated in years from what I can tell. (I'm not a graphics programmer.)
A main reason to do new OpenGL releases was to roll developed extensions to required features of a new OpenGL version to give application programmers a cohesive target platform. The pace of API extensions has slowed down enough that it's not going to be a problem for a while.
In the end, if nobody is maintaining the OpenGL standard, implementations and tooling it doesn't matter much whether it is officially deprecated or just abandondend.
.. but people ARE maintaining the implementations and tooling even if the spec might not be getting new features aside from extensions. There's a difference.
Look at Mesa release notes for example, there's a steady stream of driver feature work and bugfixes for GL: https://docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/25.2.0.html (search for "gl_")
A slow moving graphics API is a good thing for many uses.
People are writing new OpenGL code all the time. See eg HN story sumbmissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> A slow moving graphics API is a good thing for many uses.
It's not slow moving. It's completely frozen. The Mesa guys are the only ones actually fixing bugs and improving implementations, but the spec is completely frozen and unmaintained. Apple, Microsoft and Google don't really care if OpenGL works well on their platforms.
> the spec is completely frozen and unmaintained.
but, literally this article is about something new that was added to the OpenGL spec
Well, not really to the OpenGL spec itself. It's about a new OpenGL extension being added to the extension registry. Vendors may implement it if they wish. AFAIK the core OpenGL spec hasn't been updated in years, so even though new extensions keep getting developed by vendors, the official baseline hasn't moved.
I suppose the same is true of Direct3D 11, though. Only the Direct3D 12 spec has been updated in years from what I can tell. (I'm not a graphics programmer.)
A main reason to do new OpenGL releases was to roll developed extensions to required features of a new OpenGL version to give application programmers a cohesive target platform. The pace of API extensions has slowed down enough that it's not going to be a problem for a while.