Apple has every right to do that as they control their stack. And people who favor FOSS projects have every right to criticize Apple for exercising their control in a way that adversely impacts FOSS.

Sure, but comments like this attribute hostility instead of simple practicality.

> ...pointless NIH and lack of collaboration here. > Apple are doing it out of rather sickening lock-in culture in the company and Metal is far from the only example like that.

On the flip side, comments like

> no benefit to them in doing it the way that you want them to.

portray Apple almost as a helpless besieged small business that should be shielded from critique of its decisions. Whereas they are an industry titan, and people should criticize them as they see fit, even if others don't find merit in the criticisms.

> Whether you like it or not is immaterial

is a completely true, and utterly banal statement, as it can be applied to any opinion made in conversation. No one here has any power over Apple, but we do have the power to free discussion, do we not?

I find such lock-in to be hostile and not something to be excused with practicality. It's like saying ActiveX is practical, don't blame you know who for not supporting HTML, or something the like.

There is a benefit to them, but they're myopic about it. The fact that we had OpenGL and DirectX as a standard meant that a vibrant 3d accelerator market opened up, they made immense advancements since the late 90s. Apple benefitted tremendously from being able to just pick up 2 decades of R&D into GPUs that existed because consumers had a competitive choice. If software had been locked into a single GPU, say a 3dfx Voodoo1, and all software was targeted at a proprietary API and design, how much advancement would have been lost?

Apple didn't even design their own GPU, the IP behind it is largely PowerVR, again, arising from a company trying to compete against ATI, NVidia, 3dfx, Matrox, etc who were running in a bandwidth wall, by taking a big risk with a tile based deferred renderer.

Now look at what is being competed on now? Ray intersection hardware. This is happening because of Raytracing extensions to DirectX and OpenGL. Otherwise you end up with a game console, and while game consoles can leverage their HW maximally, they don't produce necessarily top end HW innovation and performance.

They sure think lock-in is a big benefit for them, that's part of their corporate culture that I was talking about. I'm just saying that it's nasty, bad for progress and it's the wrong way to do things.

    I3DRender render = Engine::GetRender("render-name");
    render->DrawMesh(scene);

So hard, I can't believe how I can manage.

That's not really a fair argument, though, because you know what you're talking about.

Like anyone that learns 3D programming.

In any case, here in an example of such approach, https://www.ogre3d.org/