top | item 46098887

(no title)

greentea23 | 3 months ago

When I was in school, the corporate shill language was MATLAB, and even today not every program has moved on to greener pastures (Python/numpy, Julia). But doesn't Swiftui support Android now? https://github.com/skiptools/skip, I'm extremely skeptical and critical of anything Apple does, and I don't like programming languages without critical mass of community and corporate contributers, but seems like Swift is going in the right direction here.

discuss

GeekyBear|3 months ago

Swift is a cross-platform compiled programming language that offers memory safety as a tentpole feature.

SwiftUI is a platform specific API for developers who are writing native apps for that platform.

You can think of Swift as being similar in concept to Rust and SwiftUI as being similar in concept to Win32.

wahnfrieden|3 months ago

SwiftUI is also now an API for writing Android native apps, too.

I don't know why you skipped over that part? It's maybe like when Google rewrote Java. Win32 is a bad comparison because there's no Win32-compatible API for native apps on other platforms (that I know of?) except for emulation, but the Android SwiftUI project is not using emulation, it runs the code natively and the result is native Android UI.

wahnfrieden|3 months ago

https://swiftcrossui.dev is also promising for somewhat SwiftUI compatible APIs across desktop OSs

bigyabai|3 months ago

I like LLVM, and I enjoy a good UI focused-language like Vala or Obj-C. Building with or contributing to Swift is a waste of my time as a Linux developer, it was in 2018 and it still is in 2025. Foundation will not fully support Linux until the late 2030s, and even a fully-implimented SwiftUI translation is still ignoring basic GNOME HIG and lagging behind best-practices. I would not be developing apps I want to use, or ship to users on other platforms. Electron would be preferable to cross-platform SwiftUI, and deep down you know it.

And that's my sympathetic opinion, as a Linux developer who loves their native UI trinkets and pseudopolish. Windows developers have dozens more options and likely won't find out Swift ever existed until Swift 2 is announced during a keynote presentation. Broader adoption of Swift has simply failed. If the language disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't know as nothing on my system consumes Swift as a dependency according to nix-tree.