OpenGL: What's the deal with deprecation?

Question

OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1 have deprecated quite a few features I find essential. In particular, the use of fixed function in shaders.

Can anyone explain what\'s really th

Answer 1

Fixed function shaders are quite easily replaced with standard GLSL shaders so it's difficult to see why logically they shouldn't be deprecated.

I'm less certain than you that they won't be dropped from much hardware in the foreseeable future as OpenGL ES 2.0 doesn't support the FF pipeline (and so isn't backward compatible with OpenGL ES 1.x). It seems to me that much of the momentum with OpenGL these days is coming from the widespread adoption of OpenGL ES on mobile platforms and with FF functionality gone from there there will be some considerable pressure to move away from it's use.

Indeed I'd expect the leaner OpenGL ES implementation to replace standard OpenGL quite widely over the next few years, and FF functionality may disappear more because most hardware will implement OpenGL ES rather than because it's removed from hardware implementing the full OpenGL