Hi yannada,

> Michael what are your thoughts, the question is how Apple's decision will
> effect the future of MoI on MacOs platform?

Well I have to say that I am definitely not a fan of the constant churn that happens on macOS, it makes for additional work and I'd really rather spend time working on new things in MoI rather than catching up to platform changes. Things do work better for me when the platform is stable.

But there are a couple of reasons why this is probably not a big problem for MoI.

One is that MoI does not require advanced OpenGL functions, it's not like I've been blocked by anything while waiting for them to update to a new OpenGL release level. It seems likely that they will freeze it at the current level and not just outright remove it, we'll see.

The other is that MoI v4 is well positioned to switch to Metal if necessary because part of the MoI v4 rewrite was to use a graphics library called BGFX which supports multiple rendering back ends. So MoI v4 does not make OpenGL calls itself directly, it makes calls into BGFX and then BGFX handles the OpenGL stuff. On Windows MoI calls into BGFX and BGFX uses Direct3D11 functions. So MoI's own viewport drawing code is well separated now from any specific graphics API.

BGFX also has a Metal rendering back end as well. I haven't tried using it yet because it was officially at WIP level when I started using BGFX and also Metal is only available starting on macOS 10.11 while I wanted to support older OS versions than that for v4. I might wait to try it until I'm comfortable requiring 10.11 as the minimum supported platform which is simplest but there is some possibility I could figure out supporting Metal only on 10.11+ while still supporting OpenGL on older platforms. I haven't dug into that yet. But anyway there is a pretty straightforward path to getting MoI to use Metal.

This could be a pretty big problem though for applications that were relying heavily on OpenGL to itself be their cross platform drawing layer and also wanting to use newer things in it.

I am myself far more worried if they give up on Intel CPUs and try to switch to ARM only.

- Michael