New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project

[bobajeff]

>This change will allow Swift to expand its reach to more platforms and use cases, sparking fresh possibilities and broadening Swift’s impact across the technology landscape.

How does having a GitHub organization tangibly impact the implied goal of making Swift more impactful outside of apples devices?

[sunshowers]

Beyond the pure signaling value, I would imagine Apple has internal GitHub tooling which maintains particular invariants for repos hosted under github.com/apple. Those invariants can potentially be relaxed or discarded altogether for a different org much easier. (Special-casing particular repos within the repos is technically possible, but (a) is harder and (b) probably runs into policy issues with legal.)

[threecheese]

It does sound a bit silly on its face; apparently the repositories are in Apple’s org which limits access to GitHub-isms to members of Apple GH teams, and so it sounds reasonable if their goal is to extend the community beyond those limits on the GH platform.

[NewJazz]

Having non-apple members in the language organization in GitHub seems like a nice improvement.

[lima]

GitHub org permissions aren't very granular, especially with an org that is tied to enterprise SSO. Makes it hard to grant certain permission to outside members.

[talldayo]

They're certainly wearing their heart on their sleeve there.

[bla3]

Does this mean Swift will finally be built on top of public LLVM instead of on top of Apple's fork of it?

[frizlab]

I read LLM at first and was confused for a second

[tosh]

They grow up so fast.

July 2010 started, June 2014 publicly released (!) feels like yesterday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)

[songbird23]

hope this works out! i really wanna work with swift outside xcode, i want it in vim

[mdhb]

I got to be honest every time I look over to the Swift/iOS development ecosystem I’m shocked at the amount of nonsense they have to deal with.

- Xcode is terrible

- Documentation is barely existent

- you can’t really reuse your code in any other context

- you have to pay them money to even release your software

- they steal 30% of your revenue

- they reserve the right to shut you down at any point, for any reason and provide almost zero recourse.

I get why people had to use it historically but it seems like a really bad choice to try and build any kind of reliable future on top of in 2024.

[armchairhacker]

Swift had good support in JetBrains AppCode.

Maybe it still does, but probably not, because AppCode was sunsetted at the end of 2022 and stopped receiving updates in 2023 (https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...). Which is really unfortunate.

If Swift ever gets good support outside of Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised if JetBrains starts working on their Swift plugin again and releases it for IntelliJ and CLion. But despite this migration, my understanding is that Swift on Linux and the new Foundation (non-Apple standard library) is still lacking.

[acedTrex]

they showed swift in neovim in the keynote when they talked about LSP support

[pkos98]

there already is an lsp available (officially from Apple).

Tried it out a month ago (on Linux using neovim) and the autocompletion was on par with golang lsp in terms of speed. Didnt check the lsp capabilities though.

[ghayes]

Try building a Swift project without Xcode. It works great. `swift build` and `swift test` all work significantly better than with Xcode, and there's no `xcodeproj` file. I am building in ST4 with good LSP and no problems at all.

https://www.swift.org/getting-started/library-swiftpm/

† The doc is about building a library, but building an executable works the same.

[airspeedswift]

you might find https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-n... useful

[frizlab]

There is an article pending in the swift website PRs on how to setup Swift for vim.

[zefhous]

I extremely excited about the future of Swift and being able to use it in new places like Embedded Swift.

As an iOS developer I’ve been getting into some firmware stuff on ESP-32. It’s my first time writing C++ and while it’s been better than I expected, I really miss Swift and especially the safety it brings.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

I really wish this now makes Swift worthwhile outside of the Apple ecosystem. A bit like Go.

[tmpz22]

It was talked about in the Platform keynote (not the main keynote) - they're doing a lot of crossplatform work, off the top of my head:

* Enhancement of VSCode support (and any editor that integrates LSP)

* Increasing supported linux and windows platforms

* Increasing support for constrained environments (embeded? dunno)

* Continued support of community products like Vapor (web framework)

[bsaul]

That would be great indeed. I’ve sayed this a few times, but i believe swift’s only chance to become mainstream is now, and only by growing outside of apple.

[candiddevmike]

Why would that make it more worthwhile? What are the compelling reasons to use Swift instead of Go?