social.noyu.me

ISO C committee, a failed standard effort:

• dysfunctional, couldn't standardise a simple improvement if their lives depended on it
• arcane, incomprehensible specs that nobody reads
• all volunteers. literally nobody involved gets paid
• they have the gall to paywall it??

Khronos (Vulkan, OpenGL) and MIDI specs:

• long track record of pragmatism
• written by big companies that have hardware to ship and no patience for bullshit
• down-to-earth, sometimes refreshingly casual, easy-to-understand specs
• everyone involved has a real job
• free :)

these are broad generalisations based on vibes and some amount of first-, second- and third-hand experience, so i can't go into detail, sorry. also, please don't be insulted if you worked on the C standard, this is not a personal attack but a statement about the system as a whole

@hikari

I would not call Vulkan easy-to-understand, nor hold OpenGL as a bastion of a spec written by "no-bullshit" ppl (the person who wrote Glium burnt out for a reason), but the other points are fair.

@cr1901 they are easy to understand compared to what the same specs would look like if the C standard committee had written them. the inherit complexity of the subject matter makes it quite hard

@hikari Yea, and I'll never not be bitter that OpenGL evolved from "draw these triangles for me and transform them via a matrix stack" to "buffer binding/shuffling", (GLSL is okay...)

@cr1901 having gotten deeply familiar with both versions of gl i unfortunately must object that the buffer binding/shuffling version is much better in practice and the old version's only real advantage was beginner-friendliness

@cr1901 the new system is easier to build an abstraction over; write the shuffling code once and you don't have to think about it again