Metal

[sacredbanana]

With macOS officially deprecating OpenGL with macOS Mojave because they only want to support Metal, it made me think perhaps I could create a Metal version of Bonzomatic. Do you think Metal shader live coding could be popular enough to warrant developing this version? The only experience I have so far with Metal is porting the Bonzomatic default shader to a Metal fragment shader. It's almost the same as GLSL so the transition is quite smooth.

[Gargaj]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Doesn't seem like Apple is leaving us much of a choice here.

[psonice]

I wasted ~30 seconds in a shader showdown last year adding shit like "#define float4 vec4" because after writing metal for a few years, going back to GLSL results in constant bugs due to wrong types :D So put me down as yes, would use Metal if it was available in the compo.

There's a bigger issue here tho. The competition machines usually aren't macs. And the chances of their being a mac at the party with an equivalent GPU are low. So, in practice, I can't see it being useful outside of home use.

For home use we're going to need it (or lose mac support) at some point but while GL is depreciated, it still exists in 10.15. So we're OK for another year.

[Gargaj]

I believe @alkama has been working on a Metal backend for a while now.

[psonice]

Oh, excellent! If any info / advice is needed let me know. Don't mind helping with code too, but the build system and tools here are not anything I'm familiar with.

[catilac]

I made a live shader editor for metal, it's really early, but it works. https://github.com/catilac/psychout

[sacredbanana]

I'm happy to create a metal version if @alkama isnt already in the middle of making one