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Comment by fleetfox | Hacker News Reader

Metal API. I can not understand why they did not just go with Vulkan.

Metal predates Vulkan by almost 2 years.

It predates the name change from Mantle to Vulcan by almost two years. Metal was built using Mantles ideas. When AMD gave it to Khronos, they changed the name to Vulkan.

Here is a comment from 2016 from a person already tired of explaining this to people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11112078

Mantle beat Metal to the press release stage, but Metal shipped before Mantle did.

Mantle morphed into Vulcan even later than that.

That has no citations and is pretty ranty. Given the timing, it seems more likely that all of the people in the industry working on similar problems identified the same problems with the previous generation APIs and since they all work with the same major developers they're going to be coming up with similar solutions.

At the time, Apple was using AMD GPUs in their macbooks.

Also their desktops. My point was just that they’re similar but not the same and everything in that space was evolving in the same directions for the same reasons. If Apple was ripping it off I’d expect them to be more similar and further apart in time.

I’m sorry but you’re quite wrong that Mantle was a simple name change to Vulkan.

The mantle API was a foundation but what came out was quite different.

Much of the Mantle team also went on to work on DX12 and Metal as well, so they have as much lineage to Mantle as Vulkan does

The comment you link to also ignores all the context of the timing, including the significant amount of time between when Metal was released and mantle was donated to khronos, and how much khronos was pushing AZDO OpenGL at the time. The post you linked is quite biased and uninformed.

Better still, AMD was the GPU vendor for Macbooks at the time of Mantles release. Sounds like classic Apple to me.

That's still no reason to keep Metal alive and ignore Vulkan. It's a huge competitive disadvantage by now. Put Metal on live support, implement Vulkan and transition to sit on a Vulkan translation layer. Profit!

Because Vulkan didn’t exist when Apple developed Metal.

Anyway, MoltenVK is a thing.

Metal is missing enough features that wrapping from Vulkan will never be ideal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com