Apple should have modernized ObjC instead of making Swift the lingua franca. Both speed of iteration and flexibility (on which web-stack-rivaling productivity features would have been possible) are gone forever.
Swift Concurrency is a tire fire that not even their async-algorithms team can use completely correctly, and useful feature like typed throws are left half finished. The enormous effort the constant further bastardization of Swift takes, is at least in part the reason for the sorry state dev tooling is in. Not even a 4T dollar company can make a reliable SwiftUI preview work, in their own IDE. Variadic generics (a seemingly pure compiler feature) crash at runtime if you look at them the wrong way. Actors, the big light tower of their structured concurrency, are unusable because calls to them are unordered. They enforce strict concurrency checking now, but the compiler is too dumb to infer common valid send patterns; and their solution to make this abomination work in real codebases? Intro a default that lets _everything_ in a module run on the main thread per default!
Swift has so many issues they would honestly be better off just moving to Rust rather than fix Swift. Seriously. The fact that it's so easy to get the compiler to spend exponential time resolving types that it very often just shits the bed and begs you to rewrite your code for it to stand a chance is shameful coming from, as you say, a $4T company. Points to deep problems with Swift.
While the C calling convention continues to rule operating systems and FFIs, I think it’ll continue to limp along. Hopefully one day that can be fixed, it’s annoying that C is what I have to reach for to call SomeLib no matter what language I’m using
Apple should have modernized ObjC instead of making Swift the lingua franca. Both speed of iteration and flexibility (on which web-stack-rivaling productivity features would have been possible) are gone forever.
Swift Concurrency is a tire fire that not even their async-algorithms team can use completely correctly, and useful feature like typed throws are left half finished. The enormous effort the constant further bastardization of Swift takes, is at least in part the reason for the sorry state dev tooling is in. Not even a 4T dollar company can make a reliable SwiftUI preview work, in their own IDE. Variadic generics (a seemingly pure compiler feature) crash at runtime if you look at them the wrong way. Actors, the big light tower of their structured concurrency, are unusable because calls to them are unordered. They enforce strict concurrency checking now, but the compiler is too dumb to infer common valid send patterns; and their solution to make this abomination work in real codebases? Intro a default that lets _everything_ in a module run on the main thread per default!
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Swift has so many issues they would honestly be better off just moving to Rust rather than fix Swift. Seriously. The fact that it's so easy to get the compiler to spend exponential time resolving types that it very often just shits the bed and begs you to rewrite your code for it to stand a chance is shameful coming from, as you say, a $4T company. Points to deep problems with Swift.
I fully, totally agree with this. The recent fixes for concurrency makes Swift look like a poor man’s Rust anyway.
I don’t disagree with anything you said.
While the C calling convention continues to rule operating systems and FFIs, I think it’ll continue to limp along. Hopefully one day that can be fixed, it’s annoying that C is what I have to reach for to call SomeLib no matter what language I’m using