Comment by adastra22
1 day ago
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.
You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.
Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.
I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.
Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".
And if you mean before the whole .NET Core rewrite, many big corp server applications were already written in .NET, products like SharePoint, Sitecore, Optimizely, Dynamics 365, Four51,.... and plenty of server infrastructure for XBox and Windows games.