[killingtime74]

Even if it's the same (faster horse?) I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked. Yes it could continue on as a fork but it's development velocity would suffer.

[threatofrain]

If we're going to be concerned about any language languishing due to a lack of support... like, I don't think people are going to put "Apple dropping support" as anywhere near their shortlist. Rust has a higher risk of losing support.

[kibwen]

Apple was the primary and only major sponsor of Objective-C, used it as the core foundation of their entire platform, and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony. Yes, being tied so closely to Apple is an existential risk for Swift. One need only look at the quality and trajectory of MacOS to see that Apple isn't a software company, let alone a company that cares about developer experience (Xcode, anyone?). As far as modern Apple is concerned, the primary benefit of Swift is that it produces a tiny bit extra lock-in for iOS apps, by making cross-platform development more difficult.

[satvikpendem]

Rust of all languages, now that it's been majorly adopted by many companies big and small, has a higher risk of losing support over a language developed exclusively by one corporation? I sincerely doubt that.

[Hamuko]

A lot of Apple's software is written in Swift now. It's probably not in their interest to abandon the language.

[HaloZero]

I mean they did switch from objective c. At some point they might switch again if it makes sense.

[nomel]

First sentence of the wiki page [1]:

> Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community.

As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific.

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

[piyuv]

Swift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.

[dochtman]

I'd bet a supermajority of Swift commits comes from Apple developers. Pretty sure the rust-lang/rust commit authors would be much less centralized.

[WD-42]

Yup just like google doesn’t actually control chromium right

[Aurornis]

I know Swift is technically not Apple specific, but it says right there in your quote that it was created for Apple and Apple is the giant weight behind it.

I doubt Apple is in danger of dropping Swift, but if they did it would create a devastating vacuum in the Swift ecosystem.

[afavour]

But the fact remains that if Apple abandoned Swift tomorrow the language would almost certainly wither and die.

[heavyset_go]

It's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol

[rvz]

> I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked.

Go's development is tied to Google Inc. and is widely used at Google. Same with Microsoft's C# with .NET and Swift isn't very different to this as long as it is open source.

So this really is a moot point.

[sealeck]

Go has a critical mass that Swift clearly doesn't (i.e. there are many, many companies who have net profits of >$1bn and write most of their server software in Go).

Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift (and where Google does publish public Go APIs it also tends to use them in the same way as their users do, so the interests are more aligned)...

[thayne]

I have similar concerns about c# as I do about swift.

I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS. But barely so. Also, if Google were to discontinue support, or change the license, or do something else disruptive, I have more faith that the ecosystem would create a fork to continue the language.

FWIW, my biggest concern isn't that the language would be completely abandoned, it is that the company would diminish or drop support for tooling on OSes and editors and IDEs that compete with the company's products (Mac OS and Xcode for apple, Windows and Visual Studio for MS).

[kibwen]

Objective-C had its own open source source implementations, along with a better cross-platform story than Swift has ever had, and yet Apple's abandonment still managed to reduce it to irrelevance.

[cube00]

IMHO your case for a moot point would be stronger if you also mentioned which company you feel is tied to Rust in the same way as the other languages you've mentioned.