Lock-in and API changes
2012-06-20 16:17:16.212982+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
JWZ announces that he has ported XScreenSaver to the iPhone:
I accomplished this by implementing most of the OpenGL 1.3 API in terms of the OpenGL ES 1.1 API.
Most of the announcement is a great rant on the idiocies of API changes:
People defend this decision by saying that they "had" to do it, because the fixed function pipeline is terribly inefficient on modern GPUs or some such nonsense. These people don't know what they're talking about, because the contour of the API has absolutely fuck-all to do with what goes over the wire.
Which also brings to mind the wankery that accompanied Microsoft's Direct3d bullshit back in the '90s, wherein we discovered that despite everything Microsoft was claiming about needing to change the API for performance reasons, on every platform we could get our hands on, OpenGL on Windows outperformed Direct3d.
When people claim they need to change long established and time tested APIs for "performance reasons", what it most often means is that clueless kids just out of school don't understand how to build software.