Chemdog, first of all, I’d like to inform you that the American Medical Association recommends that you smoke no more than three crack pipes a day.
A personal flame, a little late for V-Day, me boy. But just in time for Saint Patrick’s, when rveryone is Irish, so I have to let it slide.
First of all, the AMA recommends that you “Don’t Abuse Drugs”, whether illegal, prescription, or OTC. Inappropriate drug use can be reported to the local authorities. And kids “Be Cool, Stay In School”.
Wrong. When you rely an extension in an application, you risk your application being broken in the future.
You are right, but that’s not to which Cab was referring.
If an implementor chooses to support version 1.x, and exposes extension y, then when driver version 1.(x+1) comes out, extension y should still be exposed. (should, implementors can be daring).
If I write an application today using some extensions(and I program intelligently, so I have multiple fallbacks and alternate pipelines), then future minor versions of OpenGL will not break my code. (Every 1.* version, is upwardly compatible with the previous).
Older extensions aren’t deprecated, they just lose support. Although you could argue that this is deprecation, there will be implementors who choose to support older extensions.
Even 20 years from now, I can still write code for “GL_EXT_abgr”, and I can still use (intelligently written) applications that query that extension(ones that rely on some form of fallback, or alternate pipeline).
And some extensions don’t die, they ascend into core features.
Assuming Moore’s law, in 11 years, there will be a 8 doublings, which will occur in cost reduction or transistor density. So I just need to come up with an object totalling 8 doubling differences. Generally, I would just put today’s PC in tomorrow’s wristwatch, and the math comes out about right. So the problem is still valid, though the domain is possibly more restricted.
The first time I used OpenGL for a large project, it was for a physics simulation you wouldn’t understand. (No offense, it’s just post-doc physics that would take about as long to explain as it did to implement.) I was used to writing my own rendering packages, (because OpenGL didn’t exist when I released my first game), so learning it was not difficult. (For reference, the project used GL_EXT_vertex_array). But for physicists, mathematicians, engineers, the RedBook, and a computer science friend may be all that you might have to learn by.