PortableGL VS abrash-black-book

Yeah PortableGL will never be completely fully featured, not even for OpenGL 3.3 since I'll definitely never do the geometry shader and probably not the transform feedback. But specifically it'll never have the earlier immediate mode stuff, or some of the big 4.0 stuff like the tessellation shaders. I have been meaning to add the DSA functions where they make sense. They'd be really simple to implement.

Actually a few days ago someone sent me a pull request adding an interesting project to my README

https://github.com/rswinkle/PortableGL/commit/e0652b4dff266d...

So now if I were to try to sum up all the OpenGL software implementations I can think of,

TinyGL (and modern improved forks) = OpenGL 1.1-1.3 ish

PortableGL: An implementation of OpenGL 3.x-ish in clean C\ (23 comments)

Not entirely related to the subject of OpenGL, but I really like how the author has decided to lay out this project. It's pretty hard to beat the convenience of a single header (or single header/single source) distribution for C libraries, but library development gets progressively harder as the project gets bigger as more code is added to the (usually hard to navigate) header file. Here, the author does their development with multiple files as one normally would, but when a new version is released they run the generate_gl_h[1] script that concatenates everything into a .h file for distribution. Simple yet flexible! This is also how SQLite[2] distributes its builds. It's a pattern that I'm using myself in some unreleased projects.

[1] https://github.com/rswinkle/PortableGL/blob/master/src/gener...

Michael Abrash's Graphic Programming Black Book

[Michael Abrash's Black Graphics Programming Black Book from 1997 is a fantastic book I wish I had back then. It is available for free on GitHub. I read it maybe in 2015 and I thought it was fantastic even if it is dated now. It goes through the evolution of PC hardware (CPU and graphics cards in particular) from the very first IBM PC to the mid-90's pentiums, and the last chapter or two are about the author's work on Quake.

Also available in eReader formats: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/releases

Also look at the source for original Quake (https://github.com/id-Software/Quake), one of the last pure software-rasterizing AAA 3D PC games. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) explains many of the critical parts of the rendering pipeline.

By the way, quake.exe for DOS was 404,480 bytes.

It's also THICK. I have my copy of the 5th edition right here, and it's about 3 inches from cover to cover. Thicker than Introduction to Algorithms and thicker than the Graphics Programming Black Book.

Read Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book for the story of how the original Quake came to life. You'll get an appreciation for John Carmack's ability to thoroughly research widely varying solutions to a problem, quickly create production-quality implementations of the promising ones, and even more quickly abandon the dead ends. The result is this almost boring, seemingly linear progression toward a final product that seems obvious in hindsight, yet it represents a leap forward the way Quake did in the mid-1990s compared to other FPSes at the time. I don't know many other public stories of individual engineers who can span both the very cutting edge of research and the practicalities of shipping real commercial software.

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

The Abrash black book is on github!

Go through Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book to see how it used to be on PC world.