This is quite unpleasant situation for a developer of multi-platform software, as Apple steadily pushes to their platform-specific APIs like Metal as the only choice, which implies a stronger vendor-lock and/or a more expensive development.Īn alternative to using platform-specific APIs directly could be using a proxy-library implementing a multi-platform API on top of platform-specific API. Apple holds the full control over OpenGL functionality in system and doesn't give graphics card vendors any way to deliver users more up-to-date OpenGL features (even when their hardware supports them on other systems). In contrast, macOS is much more closed system, where all graphic drivers are part of the system and cannot be (normally) updated without updating system itself. Graphics card vendors provide drivers independently from Microsoft and OpenGL capabilities can be implemented without Microsoft approval. On Windows, system-provided opengl32.dll doesn't actually implement OpenGL but is rather a proxy-library dynamically loading functions from a driver provided by a graphics card vendor.
Built-in OpenGL on macOS works a little bit different from other platforms like Windows or Linux.
