[swatcoder]

Platform innovation requires control over your own API, because you want to expose the features and architectures that make your platform excel and that weren’t accounted for in abstracted tools. There will always be incompatible native API’s.

Meanwhile, a ton of apps and games are completely agnostic to those cutting edge platform differences and are going to thrive in least common denominator sandboxes. And making those sandboxes easy to use for some specific style/genre/skill-level is always going to be the competitive difference between them. So the big high-level things are always going to exist too.

But… so are the near-metal abstractions that let you cut through and interleave cross-platform and platform-specific code even in high-performance paths.

You wanted the last group to “win”, but the ecosystem inevitably involves all three. There will always be something like Metal, there will always be something like Unity, and there will always be something like SDL. Winning isn’t necessary.

[loup-vaillant]

> Platform innovation requires control over your own API, because you want to expose the features and architectures that make your platform excel and that weren’t accounted for in abstracted tools.

Yeah, I’m not buying that. It’s the story they tell you of course, but I think that’s a marketing lie.

Let’s be clear first that hardware is the platform. Your comment seems to agree with that. Note that for quite a long time, the Windows and Mac world used the same hardware (same CPU, same GPU), and therefore the same platform. They could have went together and specified a common API to work on both MacOS and Windows, and they could both expose all the hardware has to offer. Heck, if they really wanted to expose all the goodness hardware has to offer, they would give us the actual data sheets. They don’t, for various reasons that are generally tied to "IP".

They tell us sweet words about innovation, but let’s be honest they just want to lock us in.

[pjmlp]

Even UNIX isn't one platform, hence why POSIX is only good for CLI applications.

[andybak]

Both things can be true.

[loup-vaillant]

I was trying to respond to "Platform innovation requires control over your own API". The short answer "no it does not": look at CPUs, we just need their ISA to take advantage of any improvement.

In fact, the best way to expose any hardware improvements is to give us the data sheet. Gate keeping direct access to the hardware with an API effectively reduces user access to innovation.

One could criticise how I conflate hardware and platform. I’ll just note that all the goodness we’ve seen the past 40 years were made possible by hardware. Personally I saw precious little innovation coming from software specifically. So even if a platform is more than just hardware, actual innovation mostly comes from hardware anyway.