I miss the years where inspite of all its flaws, OpenGL was a non deprecated option on all the platforms. I know it left performance on the table, I know the drivers for some vendors were iffy and I know reasoning about performance across different vendors / drivers / platforms was difficult - but it worked most of the time and allowed me to have a mostly unified codebase everywhere.
You can still kind of have that experience by using ANGLE[1] as your OpenGL implementation. It lets you use the same dialect of OpenGL ES on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android, with consistent behavior across platforms.
ANGLE is the base of the WebGL implementation in Chrome. For WebGPU, we (Google) are working on a new native library called Dawn[2] that will fill the same role that ANGLE does for WebGL. I'm personally hopeful that Dawn itself can eventually be useful as a cross platform graphics abstraction for native apps as well as web apps. There's also Mozilla's gfx-rs[3] in the same space.
This really. I'm still using OpenGL and it's worth so much to have an adequate truly cross platform graphics API. The gfx-hal people are doing good work in Rust for a cross platform vulkan like api, but it's not there yet.
OpenGL is STILL viable today. You can use a shared subset of ES 3.x and Desktop GL 3.x, and the amount of places where you need to if/#ifdef because of differences is vanishingly small (mostly some minor shader decls). Certainly don't need a giant library like ANGLE to do this.
We still don't know when Apple will actually remove GL from their platforms, but since the backlash will be so huge, it might be a while. And even when they do, the first step of 95% of code-bases that rely on GL will be to link in some GL on Metal emulation library. The net effect will be a slight performance drop for Apple vs other platforms. Well done Apple.
At some point switching to Vulkan (and Vulkan on Metal for Apple, or the reverse if you're an Apple centric developer) may be worth it, but for the moment the amount of apps and games that will see close to identical performance in GL and Vulkan is still huge. If you are e.g. geometry/shader/memory bound, you'll see exactly 0% speedup from API changes. You really need to be pushing significant amount of draw calls to see a difference. If you're not doing this, its worth "hanging in there" with GL to see if the post-GL landscape de-clusterfucks itself in the meantime :)
It's true, but for most applications, games consoles are not even a consideration. There's a mountain of programs that only target Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS or some subset thereof.
