So I've been rather firmly targeting an OpenGL ES 2.0 pipeline for my current little project, with the idea that I'm targeting two systems for the low-end hardware: the Raspberry Pi 3, and my old Asus EeePC (Intel 945GM). And on linux, that all works fine. The Intel driver on linux only supports Desktop GL 1.4, but supports ES 2.0 with even more extensions than the honestly-pretty-barebones RasPi driver.
But the windows intel driver is... not promising. No ES 2.0 and even worse, it looks like it doesn't support GLSL shaders. Not only would I have to implement an GL1.4 pipeline that used pBuffers instead of FBOs, I'd have to figure out Assembly Shaders.
And that's possible. It's not like I'm doing anything super advanced with shaders; just palette effects and "raster" effects. But I don't exactly relish the idea. So I might just give up the idea of supporting windows on the platform and require a 965 chip.
To add further frutration to this, a proper 32-bit D build environment on linux is more work than anticipated. 18.04 is the last Ubuntu release with x86 support. There's three D compilers, DMD, GDC, and LDC.
And it turns out that:
- DMD is currently broken for outputting 32bit executables on linux.
- GDC has a backport for version 11, but that's too old to successfully compile the most popular D building tool.
- LDC requires LLVM, whose backports no longer provide 32bit packages.
So it looks like i'm going to be doing some compiling myself and I hate compiling compilers.