On Tuesday, 7 January 2014 at 19:00:46 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
You seem very concerned that the low-level API will effect the design of the high-level API. If that happens we've failed and need to try again.
No, I am afraid that you pick a high-level ENGINE (not HAL API) and dress it up. If you actually use a low level api, it will be shader based and use roughly the same pipeline. DX3D and GL have feature parity if you stay away from the esoteric stuff.
I asked Mike Parker about this at Dconf 2013, with the intent of having a reference implementation. You know what he said? Don't bother. Because in the end it does not matter which implementation you start with, other API's will look different no matter what you do, even for OGL (differing implementations), differing fonts, differing rendering pipelines, etc...
No. Simple shaders work roughly the same on modern hardware, though you need performance tweaks, avoid accumulated FP errors etc. If you don't depend on system fonts, fonts should not differ.
His advice was to pick whatever worked best for the implementor and make the other API implementations look as close a possible and have people submit bug reports.
I am arguing in favour of having one reference implementation that is highly portable. There is no need to match up pixels to anything if there is only one solution…
