It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).
Interestingly, Kotlin has a pretty solid cross-platform story.
I'd pick it over Swift if targeting Android since it can build and run in the JVM as well as natively -- and has Swift/ObjC interop. Its also very usable on the server if you wanted to, since you can use it in place of Java and tap into the very mature JVM ecosystem. If that's what you're into.
And I have a lot more faith in JetBrains being good stewards of the language rather than Apple, who have a weird collection of priorities.
Kotlin is practically a no-brainer when you have JVM at your finger tips, versus something like Swift which is comparatively young.
I tried to use Vapor with Swift recently and struggled to get something working because the documentation looked comprehensive, but had a lot of gaps. I ended up throwing it out because I didn't have the time to dig through the source to understand how to do something, when I could use a mature framework in any other language instead.
The promise is there but I'm just not ready to invest. My youthful days of unbounded curiosity are coming to an end and these days I just want to get something done without much faff.
The language doesn’t really matter. The underlying SDK/framework is where the action is at.
However, I suspect that we may not be too far off, from LLMs being the true cross-platform system. You feed the same requirements, with different targets, and it generates full native apps.
This is going to be used much more than Swift for servers. Swift is a primarily client-side mobile language. It makes sense that you tap into reusing the logic.
Anything similar for Windows and Linux?
For Windows there's a 5 year old blog post: https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/
For Linux there's a guide for GNOME: https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/
It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).
Swift on Windows has been part of the official distribution for a long time:
https://www.swift.org/install/windows/
The blog posts seems to place higher on search results --- maybe arrange to have it edited?
Which GUI toolkit(s) does that install support?
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I haven't shipped any Swift on Windows myself but I have a production Linux system using Swift (and C++ interop) and it works really well
That is going to be used... less than Swift for the servers
Interestingly, Kotlin has a pretty solid cross-platform story.
I'd pick it over Swift if targeting Android since it can build and run in the JVM as well as natively -- and has Swift/ObjC interop. Its also very usable on the server if you wanted to, since you can use it in place of Java and tap into the very mature JVM ecosystem. If that's what you're into.
And I have a lot more faith in JetBrains being good stewards of the language rather than Apple, who have a weird collection of priorities.
Kotlin is practically a no-brainer when you have JVM at your finger tips, versus something like Swift which is comparatively young.
I tried to use Vapor with Swift recently and struggled to get something working because the documentation looked comprehensive, but had a lot of gaps. I ended up throwing it out because I didn't have the time to dig through the source to understand how to do something, when I could use a mature framework in any other language instead.
The promise is there but I'm just not ready to invest. My youthful days of unbounded curiosity are coming to an end and these days I just want to get something done without much faff.
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I don't know. Could be nice for those developers that prioritize iOS and now they could keep writing Swift also for Android.
Is it gonna be what you primarily use if you wanna write an Android app? Probably not.
Is it gonna displace react Native? Probably not. Is it gonna reach the levels of flutter? Maybe.
The language doesn’t really matter. The underlying SDK/framework is where the action is at.
However, I suspect that we may not be too far off, from LLMs being the true cross-platform system. You feed the same requirements, with different targets, and it generates full native apps.
3 replies →
> Is it gonna reach the levels of flutter? Maybe.
Never. It won’t even reach Compose level, Flutter level DX is unattainable for any framework outside Flutter.
This is going to be used much more than Swift for servers. Swift is a primarily client-side mobile language. It makes sense that you tap into reusing the logic.
Just like .NET for linux... right? RIGHT?
At least a very common .NET web app framework is often deployed on linux. Powershell for linux might be more apt lol
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