Comment by melling
6 years ago
Swift has been made available for Linux for the past four years:
https://swift.org/download/#releases
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...
I’m not sure what’s missing as far as libraries, other than UIKit.
Didn't realize the Linux version was offered through the official channels. That's something.
Still, to truly compete it would need to have Windows support too. And ideally real buy-in from at least one other major tech company.
As the other poster has mentioned, IBM has put a lot of effort into server-side swift. Also Google is investing in Swift for Tensorflow, which means there is a team at Google who's job it is to work on the Swift compiler every day.
edit:
If you want you can use Swift on Google Colab right now:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/swift/bl...
A team that is lead by Chris Lattner, creator of Swift. Not bad!
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https://dev.azure.com/compnerd/windows-swift
"Support" is the kicker - I consider C# and C++ to have Windows Support because the platform vendor publishes and provides support for their own developer tools.
Do you mean that, or maybe something closer to the level of "Support" where interested parties submit improvements, and platforms are included in the CI/CD process?
> Windows Support because the platform vendor publishes and provides support for their own developer tools.
It's not from Microsoft directly, but it's worth noting that LSP support for Swift is under active development. VSCode is probably currently the second-best IDE for Swift development.
IBM uses Swift for mobile apps https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2015/12/03/introducing-the-i... and develops Kitura (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/swift), a Swift web framework.
IBM is no longer offering that Swift mobile dev kit.
The IBM Swift Sandbox is no longer available as of January 2018.
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> I’m not sure what’s missing as far as libraries, other than UIKit.
It's quite usable. A couple years ago, I tried Swift for Linux when it came out, and it was a dreadful experience. But now I do things with Swift in Docker containers and basically don't think about it.
There's a few things which aren't implemented (IIRC things like XML parsing support) but it's mostly things I wouldn't use or would use a library for anyway.