[uhura]

I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope

Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the gap will only grow over time when compared to other languages.

[jitl]

I don't get this reaction.

Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity.

Hacker News: I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Like, what more do you want from them? For them to only open-source Swift Build once they've fully implemented complete parity for Windows and Linux? In the years you'd be waiting for full parity, we'd still see this same kind of comment on every story about swift, asking when they're going to open source a production-level build system.

[bluepizza]

I don't get this reaction.

Almost every language in the world: here's the spec, the tooling, and everything you need to use, master, and expand this language. Please use it.

Apple: sorry, Mac only.

Like, I want Apple to do the bare minimum that everyone else is doing.

[gruuuk]

They should have been fully open source with full linux support and parity since day one.

That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.

[DidYaWipe]

Amen. Just knee-jerk negativity with no specific objections.

[talldayo]

> Like, what more do you want from them?

You know what we want from them. If Apple wants to be accepted by the Open Source community, they can't reprise the Microsoft playbook with a smug "Think Different" twist. This is basically a beat-for-beat rerun of the C#/Dotnet situation with a different font and Corinthian leather.

The internet at-large is sick and tired of tending to Apple's scraps at their obscure whims. If you are a developer that isn't already implicated to use Swift for iOS development, you'd be wasting your time doing Cupertino's work bringing up their language for them. They do not care, and only want to exploit your time and productivity like they do with the App Store. Much like C#, this is a scenario where everyone but the main benefactor will be thrown under the bus.

[vi4m]

I'm a bit confused about the "don't trust Apple" sentiment here.

Swift has been working seamlessly with Linux and Visual Studio Code for years now. You might be surprised to learn this, just like this guy was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTP5c4NqA8k&t=5484s

Swift is compatible with WASM and embedded systems. It has a well-defined concurrency standard, and as a compiler, it's been tested with massive codebases worldwide.

The community is incredibly supportive (Ted Kremenek's team is super active, attending community conferences and supporting the Server Side Workgroup). They also have an open swift-evolution process that mostly works.

Xcode not being open-sourced? Not a big deal. It's an older codebase optimized for different use cases. Their approach is to break Swift down into smaller, focused components (Package Manager, LSP server, a formatter, etc.)

JetBrains didn't open-source their IDEs either, and people don't complain about it. So, it's the same story, but it's better since you don't have any historical issues like "Oracle JVM" lurking around, causing trouble for the community.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety?

They painted themselves in a corner. Apple being the best computing platform while trying to please everyone can never be a serious proposition. Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS, or we have to be so careful that any alternative is more interesting that what they propose.

[thih9]

> why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform

This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.

Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Python/Kotlin/Rust/etc.

[cosmic_cheese]

Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.

[GeekyBear]

> languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety?

Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety by default.

The creator of Clang and LLVM also created Swift, and interoperability with C was an explicit design goal.

So Swift offers the memory safety and data race safety of Rust, in a compiled language, without giving up tight integration with C.

(To be fair, better C integration is something the Rust community is looking to add.)

[kelnos]

> Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS

"Best" obviously means different things to different people, but at least by market share, macOS has never been the best. Modern Apple doesn't seem to care about market share outside of the iPhone (and even then, they are still more interested in the iPhone being a premium product than winning on market share).

I used to like macOS, 15-20 years ago, but now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy. That's not the way to be "best", by any metric I can think of.

[wahnfrieden]

See https://skip.tools for a new entrant

[DidYaWipe]

The Python ecosystem is a sad mess.

[pmarreck]

Python is not compiled, it is interpreted, and it has many warts.

Kotlin depends on the JVM and is also not compiled.

Rust? Now you're talking. Except that it has warts, too.

[kelnos]

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.

[liontwist]

.net core is one of the best ways to write linux backend applications.

[WuxiFingerHold]

> This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.

[aryonoco]

I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps).

Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE.

C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong type safety, etc. All the things you need to build out the logic of business applications. And it's fully open source.

I have looked at Swift. By comparison, the tooling is 10 years behind and the performance is not even close. I struggle to see what Swift brings to the table over C#.

[codr7]

Sorry to hear that, I wouldn't bet anything on Apple but the core language contains a lot of good ideas imho.

[VWWHFSfQ]

I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."

[st3fan]

I don't know about Xcode, but Swift is open source with an active community so if it doesn't work for you then you can definitely bother the Swift Open-Source project with a pull request or a proposal for a language or tooling improvement. You can also have a discussion on the forums or in the bug tracker with fellow contributors.

You can also make the change in your own fork and use that.

This is exactly how for example the Rust or Python open source projects work. And like those projects you can look at the Swift proposals and code to see _numerous_ cases where people did bother to bother the team with change requests or directly contributed to those improvements.

It is all open source. Check it out.

[threeseed]

a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift.

b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

> anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort"

Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.

[raincole]

Whatever Apple's goal is being, the result is written on the wall: Swift's brand is strongly associated to Apple ecosystem for most programmers. They won't adopt it unless they're already targeting Apple's platforms.

See C#/.Net Core. It runs on Linux for so many years. But people still treat it as "Microsoft's thing".

[eastbound]

The goal is probably rather to allow CI on the cloud. Many companies are ok with open source licenses.

[saagarjha]

No, because it calls out to tools which are not open source.

[myko]

Simply open sourcing major frameworks like SwiftUI would go a long way to making it usable

[WillAdams]

For folks who want opensource there is always Gnustep and Gorm/ProjectCenter.app.

[pmarreck]

> I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. T

uh, wasn't .NET open-sourced under exactly the same pro/con, except towards Windows hegemony?

[talldayo]

Frankly, it makes me feel bad for Chris Lattner. This guy's been worked his ass off to create a genuinely new language with all the bells and whistles he can fit, and his employer is the one that held him back the most. It took years for Foundation framework to get serious multiplatform commitment, and unless something changes drastically I think that's going to be the sour taste that developers have in their mouths.

Apple in general seems to only understand software development through the lens of oppressive control. Maybe that's a security imperative for consumer products, but in Open Source it is an outright suicide pact. You have to treat every major platform as a first-class target, otherwise the major platforms will all switch to something better.

[meindnoch]

Lattner hasn't been working at Apple since 2017.

[raminf]

Lattner left Apple a long while ago. He's been working on Mojo, a different (Pythonic) language and runtime: https://www.modular.com