Well, that's interesting. The state of desktop OpenGL on Windows is pretty awful at the moment. The antiquated WGL APIs make it difficult to control when your application enters exclusive fullscreen mode, and as far as I know, it's impossible to control latency or get any kind of presentation feedback with them. You also can't make UWP apps that use WGL. Google's ANGLE, which is used to implement WebGL in Chrome and Firefox, is a lot better, and it lets you do fancy things like render OpenGL ES content to a D3D11 texture or to a DirectComposition surface. If Microsoft open-source Edge's WebGL engine (currently it seems like only the GLSL->HLSL translator is open-sourced,) it could become another modern way of using GLES on Windows.
Source: We rely on OpenGL to render video in mpv, and we are currently switching from using a WGL context by default to using ANGLE. Maybe this could be a third option?
Well, that would use a WebGL canvas and Edge's GLES renderer, not WGL and desktop GL. (WGL refers to Microsoft's equivalent of GLX and EGL here, not WebGL.)
While I'm not entirely sure what the strategy is with this, I'm fairly surprised by the move. This is something that would have been unheard of from Microsoft even a decade ago. They've made a bunch of really huge strides in FLOSS, but they've all been centered around developer mindshare. I totally get open-sourcing your developer tooling, especially in consideration of their Azure ambitions, which isn't bad.
I really like VS Code, which has become my daily editor of choice, I keep meaning to try the integrated debugging, but haven't. The .Net core releases have me looking at C# again, in a fairly new light. The Linux Subsystem for Windows is impressive.
All of that said, this move still surprises me. I'm not sure if/how much it will benefit the larger developer community, but it is really nice to see a much more open MS. All I can say is that the next half decade will be particularly interesting in terms of software improvements as hardware has started to level off.
Having seen a tiny little slice of the requirements of open-sourcing code at a (different) Big Software company, I really hope people give MS and other companies their deserved props for stuff like this.
As a 3rd party it's very easy to think "oh they should just release the source for X and if they don't it's because they don't want to", but if X is big and it didn't start out public, it usually takes a pretty herculean effort to get it released, often meaning someone burnt a lot of capital (of whatever sort) to make it happen.
I believe it will pay dividends for Microsoft that they're being more encouraging of this kind of thing. There's a few reasons so many of the best developers work at Google (for example), and one of them is that Google opens a lot of stuff, and actively encourages open development. I, personally, wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't contribute to Open Source communities at least part of my work day.
Microsoft knows how important developers are for a platform company, both inside and outside of the company (as evidenced by very good salaries, real offices, etc.). I just think it took them a few years to notice that one of the things good developers value is community. Now that they've figured it out, they've begun making changes. If you'd asked me 10-20 years ago, "Hey, would you ever consider working for Microsoft", I would have laughed. Today, I'd probably still say no, but I wouldn't laugh, and I'd probably even think about it for a minute or two.
The props in this case also go to the management, all the way to the top. As someone doing F/OSS at Microsoft, it has become immensely easier to do in the past couple of years - and this is largely due to a concerted push from the top to make it a part of the company culture, and get all players (from devs to lawyers) to understand that it's a good thing to be embraced, not something to be avoided.
When I joined back in 2009, I certainly didn't expect to end up shipping newly written code under GPL, of all things. And yet, here we are.
...which at the same time are collecting huge amounts of data ("telemetry") on and locking down their OS against users, as well as blatantly advertising to them within that OS. The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side. IMHO they're basically saying "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore --- monetising our users is worth much more, and they might trust us more if they think we're friendly and open."
Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing --- they contribute to and maintain lots of open-source projects, but that's not where their profit comes from.
From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS back. Windows was sufficiently open to develop applications for (I've been programming in Win32 since the Win95 days), a little RE ala Russinovich went a long way towards "opening" the darker parts, and Microsoft wasn't hell-bent on tracking users and turning their PCs into advertising platform that MS controls.
> The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side.
Excuse my language but I don't know a better or more direct way to say this but horseshit. You have no idea that's true. That's a pretty slanderous claim. I _hated_ the old Microsoft but I'd never let that hate distort my judgement the way it obviously has distorted yours.
> "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore ---
Equally horseshit.
> Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing ---
Again, horseshit. My feeling is that devs have seen the success of Linux and come to the correct conclusion which is that open-source is pragmatically a better engineering practise than not.
> From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS bac
Are you out of your mind? I can link to comments of people quipping about flying porcine objects and chilly days in hades when Microsoft started open-sourcing .Net. The new Microsoft was literally unimaginable even six years ago. I think it's incredible and Microsoft is to be encouraged. Guess what, they're not a monolithic malignant entity. They can be giving with one hand while taking with the other without there being a causal relationship.
<Insert obligatory Microsoft has changed comment?>
Except they haven't changed that much. Windows is now malware and they are bullying Android and Linux device makers with their patents, so they aren't really that different from the Microsoft that funded the SCO lawsuit.
This is great to have as a reference - the GLSL parser looks like a very thorough implementation. Thanks!
We've recently produced a WebGL implementation on top of V8 (passing calls through to OpenGL ES) - we needed it for a specific use case where a bundling a complete browser wouldn't do. We're interested in open sourcing if it's helpful to others - I'm curious to know if anyone else has a use case for an embeddable WebGL implementation? (Ours was to run three.js on the GearVR)
By the way, this is not the whole WebGL implementation, just the shader transpiler (GLSL to HLSL). Though it's good to see that their GLSL parser isn't totally insane. Somebody really ought to check it for compliance though; we really don't want to have yet another nonstandard shader compiler.
This is the second big browser component they've freed, after Chakra. I wonder if other Edge components are in the pipeline but waiting on technical and legal checklists to be completed.
JavaScript engines tend to be relatively standalone, and developed relatively separately. V8 and Chakra are both developed pretty separately to Chromium and Edge.
Readit News
Source: We rely on OpenGL to render video in mpv, and we are currently switching from using a WGL context by default to using ANGLE. Maybe this could be a third option?
While I'm not entirely sure what the strategy is with this, I'm fairly surprised by the move. This is something that would have been unheard of from Microsoft even a decade ago. They've made a bunch of really huge strides in FLOSS, but they've all been centered around developer mindshare. I totally get open-sourcing your developer tooling, especially in consideration of their Azure ambitions, which isn't bad.
I really like VS Code, which has become my daily editor of choice, I keep meaning to try the integrated debugging, but haven't. The .Net core releases have me looking at C# again, in a fairly new light. The Linux Subsystem for Windows is impressive.
All of that said, this move still surprises me. I'm not sure if/how much it will benefit the larger developer community, but it is really nice to see a much more open MS. All I can say is that the next half decade will be particularly interesting in terms of software improvements as hardware has started to level off.
As a 3rd party it's very easy to think "oh they should just release the source for X and if they don't it's because they don't want to", but if X is big and it didn't start out public, it usually takes a pretty herculean effort to get it released, often meaning someone burnt a lot of capital (of whatever sort) to make it happen.
Microsoft knows how important developers are for a platform company, both inside and outside of the company (as evidenced by very good salaries, real offices, etc.). I just think it took them a few years to notice that one of the things good developers value is community. Now that they've figured it out, they've begun making changes. If you'd asked me 10-20 years ago, "Hey, would you ever consider working for Microsoft", I would have laughed. Today, I'd probably still say no, but I wouldn't laugh, and I'd probably even think about it for a minute or two.
When I joined back in 2009, I certainly didn't expect to end up shipping newly written code under GPL, of all things. And yet, here we are.
Relicensing oss is difficult because you might need consent from all contributors, but I imagine that is easy for in-house code.
...which at the same time are collecting huge amounts of data ("telemetry") on and locking down their OS against users, as well as blatantly advertising to them within that OS. The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side. IMHO they're basically saying "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore --- monetising our users is worth much more, and they might trust us more if they think we're friendly and open."
Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing --- they contribute to and maintain lots of open-source projects, but that's not where their profit comes from.
From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS back. Windows was sufficiently open to develop applications for (I've been programming in Win32 since the Win95 days), a little RE ala Russinovich went a long way towards "opening" the darker parts, and Microsoft wasn't hell-bent on tracking users and turning their PCs into advertising platform that MS controls.
Excuse my language but I don't know a better or more direct way to say this but horseshit. You have no idea that's true. That's a pretty slanderous claim. I _hated_ the old Microsoft but I'd never let that hate distort my judgement the way it obviously has distorted yours.
> "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore ---
Equally horseshit.
> Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing ---
Again, horseshit. My feeling is that devs have seen the success of Linux and come to the correct conclusion which is that open-source is pragmatically a better engineering practise than not.
> From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS bac
Are you out of your mind? I can link to comments of people quipping about flying porcine objects and chilly days in hades when Microsoft started open-sourcing .Net. The new Microsoft was literally unimaginable even six years ago. I think it's incredible and Microsoft is to be encouraged. Guess what, they're not a monolithic malignant entity. They can be giving with one hand while taking with the other without there being a causal relationship.
They've only begun catching up with Google and Apple in this regard, though.
Except they haven't changed that much. Windows is now malware and they are bullying Android and Linux device makers with their patents, so they aren't really that different from the Microsoft that funded the SCO lawsuit.
Did you know the president of the Apache Software Foundation is also an employee at Microsoft?
It turns out that the code is offered under the (very permissive) MIT license. Cool.
We've recently produced a WebGL implementation on top of V8 (passing calls through to OpenGL ES) - we needed it for a specific use case where a bundling a complete browser wouldn't do. We're interested in open sourcing if it's helpful to others - I'm curious to know if anyone else has a use case for an embeddable WebGL implementation? (Ours was to run three.js on the GearVR)
The conformance tests have been available for years and yet they haven't bothered to pass them
https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confo...
This makes devs have write nasty workarounds if they want WebGL apps to work on Edge