Comment by account42
1 day ago
> We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited.
Why was there ever any expectation for Swift having good platform support outside Apple? This should have been (and was to me) already obvious when they originally announced moving to Swift.
Apple’s own marketing speak has Swift as a cross platform language. Just like, I suppose, C# is a cross platform language.
Apple puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.
Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage.
But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.
A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.
3 replies →
Was it Apple, or community driven projects?
> Just like, I suppose, C#
Have you actually used .NET on Linux/macOS? I have (both at home and work) and there isn't anything that made me think it was neglected on those platforms. Everything just works™
It didn't use to be that way, for a very long time.
4 replies →