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adastra22 | 8 days ago

Apple’s own marketing speak has Swift as a cross platform language. Just like, I suppose, C# is a cross platform language.

Apple puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.

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hocuspocus|8 days ago

Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage.

But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.

adastra22|8 days ago

A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.

shantara|7 days ago

Was it Apple, or community driven projects?

hypeatei|8 days ago

> Just like, I suppose, C#

Have you actually used .NET on Linux/macOS? I have (both at home and work) and there isn't anything that made me think it was neglected on those platforms. Everything just works™

adastra22|8 days ago

It didn't use to be that way, for a very long time.