[thrwawy74]

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want to build something in Apple's ecosystem.

[jb1991]

While it’s true that the language is really only useful on just Apple platforms, it is still quite an amazing language. I have professionally used about half a dozen languages over the last many years, written hundreds of thousands of lines each in all those languages, and swift is a true breath of fresh air. It checks all the boxes for me, very concise and elegant to write, yet very strictly statically typed. A nice upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols, with strong encouragement to use functional programming here and there as well. Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java. Overall just really nice ergonomics. named parameters and a wide variety of other seemingly minor syntactical characteristics act as a meaningful upgrade to make the overall process of writing code much more enjoyable for me.

The fact that Apple provides all these incredible platform specific frameworks and libraries for graphics, audio, games, GPU kernel programming, and more, it’s just the icing.

[mpweiher]

> upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols

How exactly are protocols a Swift "upgrade" to OO programming? They were in Objective-C since the mid 90s, adopted by Java as interfaces, copied by C# etc.

Also, protocols in Swift have a huge performance downside, because they decided to have them work across structs and classes: if you use a protocol in a function argument, the compiler doesn't even know the size of the argument at compile time, so copying the arguments has to be dynamically dispatched unless the compiler can figure it out in an extra optimisation pass...that's not possible when doing separate compilation.

> Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java.

A downgrade...particularly considering the epic compile times.

> named parameters

Also there since the 80s, in a less weird way.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/06/the-curious-case-of-swif...

> ...professionally used about half a dozen languages ...

What languages were those, if I may ask?

[ohgodplsno]

>Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java.

Having to deal with weakself, no reference cycles, very limited closures, having to deal with Xcode, no integration with any other IDE because Apple Apples, debatable generics, SPM, debatable cross platform abilities, fucking Tasks and Actors, SwiftUI being locked to versions of Swift, extremely limited community, few high quality open source libraries for something that only performs as well as Java is quite the hard sell.

For that price, you could also get Kotlin which fixes most of Java's problems and provides access to all the JVM as well as Kotlin/Native, with top tier DSL abilities and a really well thought out stdlib, coroutines, reified funs and much more.

[thrwawy74]

It's Microsoft's Powershell, but for Apple's OS.

[shagie]

IBM briefly did a "swift on the server" though at the beginning of 2020 IBM was no longer interested, but the page is still up. https://developer.ibm.com/languages/swift/

2016: https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/22/ibm-swift-cloud-kitura/

2016: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/swift-server/

2020: https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/01/ibm-stop-work-swift-serve...

You can run it in docker: https://hub.docker.com/_/swift

[awill]

This was so predictable. I remember those articles, and thought "Gee, IBM doesn't know what they're doing, they're just jumping on random bandwagons"

[yieldcrv]

> but the page is still up.

for now

just saw an article about IBM deleting most of their website because its a mess. It was some linkedin developer's post.

[hedgehog]

My experience was the opposite, I really like Swift but its usefulness is held back by the lack of a wider community. I'm not sure if that's due to a lack of investment on Apple's part, or maybe that it lives in an unhappy compromise between C++ and Python where there's always a more mature alternative that's good enough, but the language itself is quite nice to write.

[singularity2001]

Same, I find swift so much more ergonomic and beautiful than rust, but the development story outside (and inside) of xcode is just ugly

[threeseed]

Scala is likely a big reason as well.

It is the most similar in terms of language features and style but it has access to Java's unparalleled library and tooling ecosystem.

[lyu07282]

If they just had a proper cross platform standard library and package manager it might be more successful, it is a pretty cool language. But the north Korean esque closed apple ecosystem makes that impossible, all of that is intentional.

[pilif]

The package manager has been open source, cross platform and available since pretty much from the start.

The standard library is becoming cross-platform as we discuss it here.

[nequo]

Why is it not better for Apple to make Swift truly cross-platform?

Is it just that the maintenance cost is not worth it? Or would it threaten its ecosystem in a way that I don't understand?

It would seem that making Swift cross-platform would make Apple's ecosystem more accessible to developers. The barrier to entry would be lower if developers only needed to learn the APIs and not a whole new language and its tooling too. This would help the ecosystem stay healthy for a longer time.

[blululu]

Totally valid point that swift is only useful for developing for Apple products, but this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android. If you are dealing with iOS it is a joy compared to objective C. I would also add that it is a really nice language in general that is modern, expressive and general ergonomic.

[Illniyar]

Kotlin wasn't developed for Android. And can be run anywhere.

It was JetBrains pet project to fix archaic stuff in Java without making a Scala. It was designed from the get go for a wide base (as wide as java).

I'm not sure how it became Android's main target, but I doubt it was the original purpose.

[chii]

> this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android.

i think kotlin has more use outside compared to swift.

But a language has to start somewhere, so i wouldn't hold it against swift. It's a fairly well done language regardless, and nothing apple specific about it tbh (which are all just libraries).

[philwelch]

I thought Kotlin was pretty widely used as a Java alternative on the backend

[stevefan1999]

At least I got to integrate Spring Boot well with Kotlin. Same goes for writing Minecraft mods.

[GeekyBear]

> just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language.

It's like Rust in that it offers memory safety by default without a big performance hit.

[kitsunesoba]

I think many also find its syntax more approachable compared to that of Rust. It's got a lot of bells and whistles, but newcomers don't have to use them right away and can pick up more advanced bits as they become comfortable with doing so.

[cellularmitosis]

> without a big performance hit.

You might be surprised (I was). Most of the benchmarks I’ve seen place it more in the neighborhood of golang and v8, rather than the C, C++, rust neighborhood you might expect.

Another commenter in this thread highlighted that the ref-counting GC is what keeps it out of the C / Rust performance neighborhood.

[kevingadd]

From what I've seen the ref counting can cause a big performance hit. Maybe this has improved in the last couple years?

[vxNsr]

While generally true that you’re not gonna find swift anywhere else, this company[0] is making their browser cross platform and using swift as the language. Apparently there’s a proof of concept runtime for windows that they’re actively working on.

[0] https://arc.net/

[_the_inflator]

You got a point. On the other side, arguably, one could say the same about C#, JavaScript or Python.

It took real effort from Microsoft into the Open Source space to make it more widely popular. Far away from Java or JavaScript, but I see many similarities between the development and evolution of Swift and C#.

Almost everything starts as a domain specific language. Same goes for JavaScript. First browser only, then through Node, suddenly JavaScript everywhere.

Python gained massive traction through Jupyter. Before that, I found Python a clumsy alternative to JavaScript. Since then I have changed my mind. ;)

[scns]

Python came preinstalled on pretty much every Linux box before Jupyter IIRC.

[29athrowaway]

There was a lot of excitement when it first came out.

I tried Swift for Linux, and soon realized it was a meh experience (NS this, NS that... NextStep is still there) and switched back to Rust.

It could have been a strong Rust alternative.

[dwaite]

That is partly what this article is about - a swift-native set of foundation modules.

[carbocation]

As someone who mostly writes Go, I enjoy Swift the language. I am guessing that your concerns are centered on Swift the ecosystem? (E.g., it's only used for Apple things, so there are probably not libraries for Thing X.) If so that makes total sense to me. If not, I'd be interested to hear more.

[rvz]

> No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want to build something in Apple's ecosystem.

“No one”

Yet The Browser Company (The one that is hyping the Arc Browser) is writing their browser in Swift to support Windows. [0] which that is their main product.

The Browser Company is not “No one”.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_fNuaSE_I

EDIT: So this video doesn't show someone choosing Swift outside of Apple and using on a different platform (Windows) and doesn't disprove the claim of "No one outside Apple chooses Swift"?

Surely you can do better than some of the very low effort replies below.

[ohgodplsno]

The Browser Company is absolutely no one. They're barely more influent than me creating a repo on github, and that kind of impact is pretty damn low as is. They're a 0.000% browser share company that runs a tight marketing campaign of only inviting tech influencers to their browser. Mind you, said browser has good ideas, great ones even. But overall, they're absolutely no one.

iOS/macOS devs use Swift on other platforms because it's the only language they know, yeepidodadey. Ignore the fact that 99% of their project is cinterop with Chromium

[iknowstuff]

The who

[Grustaf]

Even if it was a 100% Apple language, that would still be quite relevant. Apple's devices are pretty pervasive, especially among the well off.

[brundolf]

You're saying two things as if they're a contradiction, but they aren't

It's valuable to Apple to have a language perfectly tuned to their stack, as the official entrypoint to all their APIs. If you need to use those APIs, you're excited about Swift. If you don't, you aren't

[pjmlp]

The same appeal as .NET on the Windows ecosytem, Objective-C on NeXT/OS X, Java/Kotlin on Android (plenty of stuff that is Android only beyond the basic standard library, C++ OS specific SDKs,....

Many people are more than happy to do all their career on a specific platform.

[baby]

If they had waited a little bit Rust would have been a great option. That's a shame.

[masklinn]

Unlikely, rust is rather inconvenient for gui applications.

And not at all compatible or easily bridgeable with obj-c, which was not optional.

[dwaite]

Not really. The two are somewhat sister languages, but they have been syntax-optimized toward completely different focuses.

Swift for example defaults to copyable value types and reference types that are refcounted because that is what is most often needed for evented application code, while Rust defaults to non-copyable objects (with wrappers for things like reference counting) because of its systems development focus.

Swift also had a hard requirement of a decade of co-existance with Objective-C. A significant number of Swift types toll-free bridge with objc (and corefoundation) alternatives, and that had a considerable impact on the standard library. Their base library would be different from Rust's "std" due to needing different implementations of strings, vectors, dicts and so on.

The two do take quite a bit of inspiration from one another, and will gradually grow to support an ever-larger overlapping set of use cases, but the design constraints of the existing language will still mean that one or the other is better for a specific task.

[o1y32]

No, that's not possible. Just one example -- In Rust/C++, developer is responsible for managing the memory, while in Java/Swift etc the language does most of the work for you. This alone can fundamentally change many aspects of language design and mean completely different experience for developers

[irrational]

Is there a way they could have known that?

[deanCommie]

Who outside of Apple is using Objective C?

That's like...Apple's whole deal. Proprietary everything top-to-bottom.

[awestroke]

The appeal of swift is that it is lightyears better than ObjectiveC. To ObjC developers that are used to being treated like trash by Apple (abysmal documentation, stone age IDE and tooling etc) that's huge

[lapcat]

Apple's documentation was actually vastly superior before Swift. In fact, I often refer to the documentation "archive" instead of the latest docs.

The decline in the docs is due to a number of factors, but I would say mainly it's (1) the relentless annual major OS update schedule, (2) the proliferation of OS (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, xrOS?), (3) the dual language stack, (4) Apple personnel turnover.

[iainmerrick]

What’s changed there?

I do quite like Swift overall -- it’s usually terser than Obj-C and I like the much stricter and more expressive type system. But you pay for that with much longer compile times, and the tooling feels much the same (Xcode is still Xcode).

[sumuyuda]

Lol, Apple is still treating developers like trash, just a new language now.

[djha-skin]

There's not even anything technically interesting about the language. Reference counting? Really? We have so much more than that and you just went with reference counting. Ugh

[olliej]

> There's not even anything technically interesting about the language

It's a modern statically compiled language with complex generics, that supports providing a generic interfaces in libraries with retaining ABI compatibility. Which no other modern "system" language supports. That's fairly technically interesting to me.

> We have so much more than that and you just went with reference counting

Like what?

The options for memory safe shared ownership are refcounting or GC.

Assuming you're talking about rust, that's just C++: object lifetime is lexical, and if you need it to last longer you have to use Arc/Rc/shared_ptr. The purpose of the lifetime and borrow checkers is to ensure exclusive access, and reduce the copy/destruction churn that you get from the C++ model (a hypothetical C++ that only allows the use of unique_ptr instead of raw pointers - obviously C++'s type system and approach to memory safety is not a Good Thing).

But it's important to realize rust did not create a new solution to object lifetime management for shared objects.

It's also important to realize that rust was designed in an environment where there was no existing code to interoperate with, whereas Swift was designed to work with the existing Darwin APIs and objective-c which are all refcounted. So even if no refcounting was the goal you'd end up with a new language, designed for a specific environment, and the default behaviour would not be correct.

Now that the language is more established, and it's less critical for every part of the language to have objc interop they are working on pure ownership semantics, for the same reason as rust: it saves copies without requiring a refcount[1]

[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/OwnershipManif...

[zarzavat]

What would you use instead of ref counting? Swift is an embedded language for Apple’s own chips, they can optimize the hell out of refcounting at silicon level.

[brink]

Seems a lot of people feel the way you do. I had to make something using swift once, and could barely find a community to help me decipher the cryptic swift documentation centered around their coreml library. Apple is keeping Swift on life support, imo.

[blululu]

CoreML is a bit of an exceptional challenge beyond just Swift. Admittedly it could really use a lot more documentation from Apple, but it would be unfair to judge swift based on an uncommon and under documentated library (I suspect that it would get a lot more use if it were not so hard to set up).