If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot • Hacker News Board

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#111

Post by rphlx » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:29 AM UTC

malachismith wrote: post #57

marshray wrote: post #51

It's not like there's this massive base of OpenGL code just waiting to be ported to embedded devices if there were just a few more API calls. Yes, there's glxgears, screensavers, and handful of open source games. You could probably get some old CAD programs to run on your Android. But if we compare the massive number of newly written OpenGL ES applications to all the old OpenGL 1.x fixed pipeline apps, the latter see…

You kind of miss the point. This is a philosophical argument ILLUSTRATED through OpenGL and a port. To quote, "thou shalt not break working code"

That is a noble goal, but it's one of hundreds of often-conflicting noble goals. It's not inherently wrong to design a toaster that fails to work as a refrigerator.

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#112

Post by hnizgreat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:33 AM UTC

Y NOT JUST USE OPENCL FOR GRAPHICS LOL MORON

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#113

Post by hnizgreat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:34 AM UTC

phillmv wrote: post #37

codedivine wrote: post #5

Much respect to JWZ, but I don't agree here. I am not even sure what to say, except that he is wrong, so I will just leave it there. And no, I was not involved in anyway with GL ES specification.

The above comment is not particularly useful, interesting or relevant. Neither is this one.

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Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#114

Post by hnizgreat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

hnizgreat wrote: post #112

Y NOT JUST USE OPENCL FOR GRAPHICS LOL MORON

U SUCK STOP DOWNVOTE ME BITCHES. I AM RITE!!!!! OPENCL RUN DIRECT ON VIDEO CARD!!! OPENGL IS STUPID NEWAYZ!!! JUST USE DIRECTX!!

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#115

Post by hnizgreat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:44 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #55

VoiceOfWisdom wrote: post #2

If you use green text on a black background you are an idiot.

Green text on a black background is very readable in normal lighting, yet doesn't assault the eyes if you are reading in a darkened room. In addition, there are still people using CRTs. Green on black is often clearer than white on black or black on white, especially in a small font, on CRTs because it is essentially monochrome, and so cannot suffer from fuzziness due to color misalignment.

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Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#116

Post by astrodust » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #106

ecaron wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God what flamebait, how is this near the top of the front page? Because the source is widely respected and has an amazing demonstrated grasp of what good programming involves.

Yes but in this case he's an idiot. Try asking Carmack. Any GPU programmer knows GL 1.x was utter crap. Good riddance.

jwz, if you've been following him, is inherently pragmatic. He's a follower of the philosophy that the computer, and by extension the frameworks and languages to program it, should be subservient to the programmer. They shouldn't tell you how to live your life or behave like a stubborn mule when, for whatever well intentioned reason, people decided to overhaul the spec everyone depended on.

I think his argument is that OpenGL ES should have had an "optimal" mode, where performance is best using the newer calls, and "compatible" mode, where if you don't care about performance and just want to port, you can get by. This appears to be what the jwzgl layer does.

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#117

Post by astrodust » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:52 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #56

This guy needs to get over himself. The world doesn't revolve around his pet project. His rant is stupid for at least four reasons. First, OpenGL ES is not regular OpenGL. If it were, it would just be called "OpenGL". It's a different thing, based on OpenGL, but targeted at mobile phones and "small" devices. It's almost like complaining that DirectX and OpenGL have different interfaces. They're different things, ther…

If you were porting GL-based screensavers that were written a decade ago you'd probably be feeling the same way. You don't want to rewrite code that already works on an earlier version of the spec.

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#118

Post by prodigal_erik » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 4:55 AM UTC

fpgeek wrote: post #97

saurik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but again: those are the parts of the API that are already discouraged and downright deprecated as of OpenGL 2.0. If you were developing an app targeting OpenGL 2.0, following what I understand are the best practices for that version of the specification, OpenGL ES will require little to no porting. The problem then, arguably, is not that OpenGL ES is called OpenGL but that OpenGL 2.0 added an entirely unrelat…

OpenGL 2.0 was released in September 2004 (Wikipedia). OpenGL ES 1.1 (which jwz complains about here) was ratified and publicly released in August 2004 (going back to OpenGL ES 1.0 would only make the comparison worse, of course): http://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-group-announces-th... That's a quite, um, impressive deprecation cycle, I suppose.

Seven years is not a long time. My toaster is older than that, and I like to think the people who made that would be embarrassed if those cheap moving parts had decayed so quickly.

You probably have enough horsepower at your disposal to emulate each and every computer you ever bought (simultaneously!) and run all that software forever. But instead we're going to require any tool you want to use to be rewritten half a dozen times over the course of your career alone. And why? Because fuck you, we just can't be bothered to start taking engineering seriously.

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#119

Post by bzbarsky » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 5:02 AM UTC

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #100

semanticist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he didn't port his code to OpenGL ES - he ported the missing API from OpenGL 1.3 to OpenGL ES. If it takes one developer three days to implement the missing API, then perhaps it suggests that this API wasn't in any way damaging to the new system and could have been left in place originally?

And lets not forget he's also unwilling to help people out by uploading his OpenGL wrapper to github (or by extension any revision control system). http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...

The source is available in http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscreensaver-5.16.tar.gz and he mentions that in his blog post.

How much more help are you expecting him to provide? Why would it be any more "helpful" for him to put it in some revision control system instead of just posting the source?

Re: If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

#120

Post by orangecat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 5:10 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #21

He probably won't be very happy to know OpenGL ES 2.0 is not backward compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1.

I wasn't. I can understand getting rid of immediate mode; as jwz demonstrated it's not that hard to rewrite glBegin/glVertex code to use vertex buffers. But 2.0 has an absurdly steep learning curve if this tutorial is accurate: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/opengl/open.... Multiple custom shaders to draw a single triangle, really?