I've built a small Cocoa app that uses OpenGL to draw some light content. I've used CAOpenGLLayer. While the app itself is very small and works blazingly fast, the launch time of the app is not satisfactory at all. At random times the app would stall for about a second or two upon launch, before showing the content.
I've narrowed down the problem and found that the bottleneck is the CGLChoosePixelFormat() function that is called during OpenGL initialization. It literally takes ~1 second to execute.
For a clean experiment, I created a blank Cocoa app and added an NSOpenGLView to the window. Immediately, the app launch time has grown by 1-2 seconds, for the same reason.
Is there a way to fight this problem? There seems no way to avoid using CGLChoosePixelFormat(), it's essential for getting OpenGL to work on a Mac.
Also, it's said that Core Animation is built upon OpenGL under the hood, but my Core Animation apps do not exhibit this slow startup problem at all. Also, I tried a symbolic breakpoint on CGLChoosePixelFormat in a Core Animation app, but it doesn't trigger. So Core Animation is either not using OpenGL or there is a way to initialize it in a different way. Does anybody has a solution?
P.S. I know Metal is now the way to go for 3D graphics on Macs, but I need to do this particular project on OpenGL for backward compatibility reasons.