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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.

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.

They can use a simple subset.