All the whining and complaining makes me wondering how anyone was able to write something with OpenGL at all. This is fascinating because a great amount of people were actually able to write awesome Games and Applications with this API.

Look at the whole lot of mobile devices. I have no numbers to base this statement on but I would be bold enough to claim that OpenGL is thanks to the multiplatform ability by far the most successful graphics API out there. The set of devices that brings some or another form of OpenGL support outnumbers other graphics platforms. This alone is a huge accomplishment. Heck, even Minecraft was able to run on PowerPC systems until they pushed the java version supported[1].

But now I need to look at the link and have to admit that the criticism is still correct. The API is still pretty rough and could see some improvements. I know this myself, I also played around with OpenGL at some point. There is a lot of boilerplate code that needs to be written before you can start yourself with the real game. This was always the case. This is why we always had an engine, a framework to built on.

But to say that it all is a huge pile of shit is a little bit harsh …

[1] https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/884921-mine...

pjmlp

Except other APIs offer what in OpenGL requires an engine/framework.

- Font loading

- Texture loading

- Shader loading

- Math library

- Geometry loading

- Meshes

- Integration with the OS UI

- Debugging capabilities

flohofwoe

What other APIs would that be which offer this functionality? In D3D this used to be offloaded into a separate D3DX API, but AFAIK this is no longer supported in Windows8 (at least in the WinRT API) and has been moved into separate mostly personal projects (e.g. http://directxtex.codeplex.com/). A 3D rendering API should only be concerned about efficient 3D rendering and not burden itself with specific resource file formats. For OpenGL there's plenty of libraries to choose from, for instance:

- glm for math (http://glm.g-truc.net/0.9.5/index.html)

- gli for texture loading (http://gli.g-truc.net/0.5.1/index.html)

- assimp for general asset loading: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/index.html

- the STB headers (not OpenGL specific): https://github.com/nothings/stb

- GLFW as window system glue and input wrapper

- ...and more which I am not aware of or forgot to list

GPU vendors also have SDKs and especially debugging tools (e.g. NVIDIA nSight which integrates into VStudio). It's not in one place like in DirectX, but on the other hand, the OpenGL world has a lot more platforms and usage scenarios to cover then D3D or the various new-style APIs like Metal or Mantle (these are the actual motivation for OpenGL-Next, reducing overhead even when this means a lower-level API which is even more focuses and harder to use then before).