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Yes, it's like watching history repeat itself. Apple is the new pre-20xx Microsoft, Metal is the new DirectX, Swift it the new VB(A/Script).

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No. There is a huge difference in that Apple has strong competitors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon), while Microsoft didn't at the time.

Since Android now holds the vast majority of the mobile market in many regions, game engines have to support multiple APIs and cannot just switch to Metal. While around ~2000 pretty much everyone was only doing Direct X.

Obviously, this is only good for users. There wouldn't be much incentive for Apple to come with Metal if they had 97% of the market. And the ball is now in Google's court to outdo Apple.

Swift is hardly VB. Swift is a modern functional language competitive with Java. It's far more complex than Objective-C. The threading model in Swift utilizes GCD and Closures versus the "perform selector in background" semantics of ObjC.

Not for junior engineers.

A PC vendor-specific high-level language? VB is the obvious comparison. Sure Swift is a better language, but it fills the same niche as VB - a platform has a difficult API and they want a more productive language, so they make something very high level using popular practices of the day, custom made to map tightly to their platform.

It's just the popular practices in that niche in VB's day were things like Delphi and Tcl/TK, whereas Swift comes out in the day of Java/C#/Golang.

They can use a simple subset.

Objective-C supports GCD just fine. In fact, I make use of that far more often than "perform selector..." and I'd say I'm probably not in the minority on this.

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