alt Hacker News > Metal takes Direct3D's object-oriented approach one step further by combining it with the more "verbal" API design common in Objective-C and Swift in an attempt to provide a more intuitive and easier API for app developers to use (and not just game developers) and to further motivate those to integrate more 3D and general GPU functionality into their apps.
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It's been possible for quite some time.
In the early 2000's there was a book on using Direct3D from C# that was pretty influential as far as changing people's assumption that you couldn't do high performance graphics in a GC'd language. In the end a lot of the ideas overlap with what c/c++ gamedevs do, like structuring everything around fixed sized tables allocated at load time and then minimal dynamic memory usage within the frame loop. The same concepts can apply at the graphics API level. Minimize any dynamic language overhead by dispatching work in batches that reference preallocated buffers. That gets the language runtime largely out of the way.
Yes and https://reviews.llvm.org/D69991
No, it doesn't. You won't find it used much if at all at these levels of the OS. Once you get past cocoa and friends it's restricted subsets of C++ (IOKit for example)
There is a Metal Obj-C API, Metal implementation is C++.
Modern graphics APIs minimize the number of graphics API calls vs. OpenGL and similar. Vulkan/Metal/DirectX 12 will have you pass command buffers with many commands in them instead of separate API calls for everything.