I would honestly have been happy if we just had OpenGL compute shaders available on all desktop operating systems. That was standardized in 2012 by OpenGL 4.3, two years before Metal.
> Let's not also forget that apple isn't an outlier for lockin, and actually are quite open. OpenCL, Clang, webgpu, swift etc are all very open and cross platform.
OpenCL is deprecated on macOS, and hasn't been updated past OpenCL 1.2 (2011). It was killed in favour of Metal.
I hope that WebGPU is a good cross-platform API for GPU compute when the standard is finalized and implemented, but I've learned not to count my chickens before they hatch.
> Let's not also forget that apple isn't an outlier for lockin, and actually are quite open. OpenCL, Clang, webgpu, swift etc are all very open and cross platform.
OpenCL is deprecated on macOS, and hasn't been updated past OpenCL 1.2 (2011). It was killed in favour of Metal.
I hope that WebGPU is a good cross-platform API for GPU compute when the standard is finalized and implemented, but I've learned not to count my chickens before they hatch.