Hello!
It’s rob from hexler.net, here’s something I would like to poll people about concerning Syphon and visual apps on OS X in general being locked to OpenGL 2.1.
I am currently working on a couple of projects that (currently) include Syphon support, but I am also on the fence about actually ditching GL2 support in favor of a GL3 based renderer moving forward. I’ve had a look around what’s available app-wise for visualists on OS X and it seems to me everyone is kind of getting comfortable with the existing sort of baseline of coding against GL2 and the obvious implications of this (GLSL version/programmable shader stages/uniform buffers/etc.).
I am wondering what your opinion is on this and where you see Syphon regarding this in the future? Are there any plans to produce a GL3 based version at some point? I seem to recall seeing a project on GitHub that actually tries to do just that, but of course I understand that this move would probably break compatibility with existing servers/clients based on GL2 (for the “fast” way of sharing the textures on the GPU anyway).
As it stands now, I don’t see much problems for my own software to make the move, but Syphon is one of the more important things that I would hate to lose. I’d be more than willing to actually help out and contribute to any efforts in this direction though if there are any such plans.
I also seriously think it is time that more visual software should start making this move if we all want to start using a bit more up-to-date tech at some point, but I guess that’s a topic for a different forum.
All the best,
rob.