Yes -- although it looks like the main focus of their involvement is to contribute code allowing Blender's physics-based renderer Cycles-X to render with Metal, now that OpenGL is deprecated.
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Apple Launches Redesigned Open Source Website
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I think Apple just acknowledged what the rest of the world already knew, which is that OpenGL was designed for a single-core CPU, single-core GPU world in the 1990s. As more cores of both kind came along, more and more CPU time was getting burned up by the task of keeping everything in a constrained sync state. That's why the industry stopped advancing the OpenGL API and started over with Vulkan, which is able to delegate sufficient context to give GPU cores sufficient autonomy that the CPU no longer has to orchestrate everything quite so heavily. Having said that, Apple should straighten up and support Vulkan directly, rather than relying on an open-source translation layer.
We use it quite a bit. Yet another example of Apple ditching the scientific computing market.
You're conflating OpenGL with "the scientific computing market." I've worked in research computing environments and yes, there are a surprising number of university departments relying on mission critical software written by some grad student who shuffled off in 2014 or so. But the problem isn't Apple deprecating OpenGL. It's how few university departments understand the software development life cycle and try to make do by using grad students, very very inefficiently, as spackling.
A lot of the industry-standard tools I use use OGL. None are going to be rewritten to target Metal when they work fine on the predominant OS - Linux. I'm certainly not going to spend the time to do it.
The research is the product, not the software. Therefore, rewriting software to chase newer APIs when the original answered the mail tends to be wasted time (we do, in fact, still write in Fortran quite a bit). This is why ditching legacy APIs for Apple's convenience isn't exactly encouraging and why Linux is the future (also, actually, the present) for that market.
"It's how few university departments understand the software development life cycle"
Because in this instance the "software development life cycle" isn't particularly useful or relevant.
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Is Darwin still open source and under development? I didn’t see it on their featured products
Or just so we can fix the bugs that you've been ignoring for years.
It's just a website redesign, and putting on GitHub the sources that were already public on the website. Nothing new was released as open source that wasn't already there week.
I think Chess.app is the only GUI app that they publish as open source. They didn't release any new source code today, they merely gave the website a new look.
"Most developers" don't fit into the category of most developers.
Apple has brought Tensorflow to the M1, using Metal. I'm not sure you realize exactly how much Metal is the GPU hardware architecture and how much the GPU hardware *IS* Metal. Porting Vulkan or any other compute layer would introduce a serious hit.
If Apple continues to make hardware that's well beyond what others are making in a performance/watt scenario, more things will come to it.
The Metal Shading Language is a subset of C++ and it's pretty straightforward. Things had to be ported to OpenCL, and OpenCL things got ported to Vulkan. Change happens all the time.
i thought swift for tensorflow was abandoned like several other swift projects. it's just not taking hold outside of apple. we see more c# games in the app store than swift for example.
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As long as Apple Developers are forbidden from contributing to Open Source in their free time, this means nothing.
You mean like Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, who works at Apple on the iOS Simulator, and in his spare time, keeps XQuartz up-to-date? And also contributes to MacPorts and clang?
And until it is, you’re going to be stuck hacking old Fortran code from a grad student who left the lab in 1989.
I learned Fortran in high school, around 1977. It’s fair to say that anybody still finding it mission critical — for anything other than maybe communicating with a spacecraft launched in 1978 — has boxed himself into a pretty serious corner.
Now, I understand how it happens, how grant structures don’t generally offer any opportunity to update software, and how grant officers are likely to shrug with ”they already have software to ‘open their mail’ so no funding to modernize it” and such.
It’s been my pleasure to work with a lot of researchers in a national lab. They know their stuff, but they don’t know software engineering, and they don’t know the price they’re paying -- or, rather, their long-suffering grad students are paying -- carrying effectively unmaintainable legacy code.
No. He has special privileges. From an anonymous Apple employee:
"This is interesting from the external perspective, but let me provide the internal one: Employees are prohibited from so much as _thinking_ open source for anything not directly managed or maintained by Apple. Swift is one thing, but suppose on your own time, you had OSS interests. It was made abundantly clear to we lowly SWEs that _any_ perceived OSS participation - so much as commenting on a GitHub issue - without approval would be cause for immediate termination. Said approval requires the unanimous approval of multiple SVPs, including Federighi and Schiller themselves. IIRC the number of Apple employees given such arrangements was in the low 50s last I checked."
Darwin is the name given to the XNU kernel and the various Unix/BSD components combined. Each of these things are available. I do not think that there is a single, combined download (you’d have to look at third-party projects such as OpenDarwin or PureDarwin).
Sounds good!
People underestimate how much of the support and work on open source projects come from big ass corporations. Unlike many users, companies are pragmatic about whatever tool gets the best result.
People underestimate how much of the support and work on open source projects come from big ass corporations. Unlike many users, companies are pragmatic about whatever tool gets the best result.