Comment by dagmx

Windows has third party support for Vulkan and OpenGL. It is NOT first party.

It's definitely more convenient than Mac because it is provided by the driver and so you can almost always guarantee they exist, but Microsoft themselves do not provide them. On Mac, for Vulkan you can use MoltenVK which is also third party, and bundle it in the app, though definitely less convenient and less fully featured.

Regarding Xbox, that's a bit of an odd point because you might as well include iOS as a platform at that point which is a bigger gaming platform than Xbox. At least iOS uses the same Metal as Mac, while Xbox does vary in some ways from Windows. Granted, iOS gaming is much more casual oriented but there are some AAA games as well.

Regarding Swift, Metal has always been ObjC first not swift first. The C++ bindings are just for convenience, but you've never been bound to Swift even before they existed. Regarding Xcode, that's only to get the toolchain or if you need instrumentation. You don't need to use Xcode to actually develop things, this is no more a burden than needing Visual Studio on Windows.