i worked with SwiftUI for about two years, and i think it's a really nice language. the compiler is very slow though.<p>but i think it's too coupled to Apple still. when i tried getting anything running on non-Apple, i had so much trouble i decided then to not even bother.
good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though.<p>around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python.<p>it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.<p>the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.<p>I think the letdown was on the Apple side - they didn't bring in the community fast enough whether on marketing, or messaging - unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++.
> the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.<p>I was in college at the time and doing some odd freelance jobs to make some money. Unbeknownst to my clients I was writing their website backends in swift, using build packs on heroku to get them hosted.<p>It was a fun time for me and I love swift but I will admit last year I went ahead and rewrote an entire one of those sites in good ol typescript. I love swift but anything outside of the Apple ecosystem with it just seems like it hasn’t hit critical mass yet.
> Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem<p>Even today, with the fancy Swift 6.3, the experience of using Swift for anything other than apps for Apple platforms is very painful. There is also the question of trust - I don't think anyone would voluntarily introduce Apple "The Gatekeeper" in parts of their stack unless they're forced to do it.
True. Google was even thinking of switching TensorFlow from Python to Swift.<p><a href="https://github.com/tensorflow/swift" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tensorflow/swift</a>
That’s really because Chris Lattner was at Google Brain at the time. Don’t think it ever took off in meaningful ways
I was enthusiastic about early TensorFlow in Swift efforts, sorry when the effort ended. My interest then flowed into early Mojo development for a while.<p>I wrote an eBook on Swift several ago but rarely update that book anymore. Count me as one of the many developers who for a while thought Swift would take over the world. At least Swift is a fun language to use, and now with LLM coding tools writing macOS/iOS/iPadOS apps is fairly easy.
Python 3 barely managed to dethrone Python.
I'm sorry, that's absolutely bullshit. In fact, I wish we had left everyone who complained behind—the python community would have been happier and healthier for it. Absolute crybabies who wanted to be catered to without caring for how intractable the problems with python2 were—e.g. dealing with unicode was a royal pain in the ass, and the bytes/string divide completely fixed it. IMO, it was the best-executed breaking change I've ever witnessed in a language.<p>In comparison, e.g. Scala 2 -> Scala 3 was an absolute nightmare—it just didn't have the same vocal wailing from maintainers in the community (or, I suppose, a fraction of Python's popularity to begin with).
Being to aggressive in breaking stuff gets you a shitshow like Node.js or Ruby. Long-term source code compatibility is a very useful feature for open source and a sign of a mature eco system. Feel free to add stuff, but once it's part of a stable release it has to be maintained long after a "better" way to do it comes along.
Python's interactive interpreter makes it pretty useful as a shell, for iterative development, and crucially useful in a Jupyter notebook. I've also found CircuitPython's interpreter to be bonkers useful in prototyping embedded projects. (This, on top of the nice datascience, ML, and NN libraries).<p>Swift just wasn't doing the same things. And even if it did, Swift would compete with other languages that were understood as "a better Python", like Julia. Even then, Swift only came to Linux in 2016, Windows in 2020, and FreeBSD less than a year ago with WWDC 2025.<p>I think it doesn't help that the mid 2010s saw a burst of Cool and New languages announced or go mainstream. Go, Julia, Rust, TypeScript, Solidity, etc. along with Swift. I think most of us only have space to pick up one or two of these cool-and-new languages every few years.
> could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.<p>In 2015-2017 you could interop with C, C++ support wasn't added until very recently.<p>I do agree with you though and I am not sure what the exact reasoning is, but Swift is definitely an Apple ecosystem language despite the random efforts to gain traction elsewhere.
> around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python.<p>Why could it?<p>> it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.<p>Half a dozen languages fit this description.<p>> the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.<p>No, not at all. Kitura, Vapor (a fitting name) were just a toys that no serious player ever touched.
After that, and IBM losing interest, Apple did hire a few competent people (including contributors to Netty and Akka) to build the Swift Server Workgroup.<p>But I don't know why I'd pick Swift on the server when Rust is better in almost every dimension, with a thriving and more community-driven ecosystem.
Maybe Chris Lattner leaving and creating Mojo also didn’t help in that regard.<p>Swift for TensorFlow was a cool idea in that time …
Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it":<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400</a><p>--- start quote ---<p>Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...<p>We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.<p>--- end quote ---
For this language to become default at Apple they had to be doing a massive amount of internal promotion - in other words they knew where it was going.<p>And then if that's the case, how were they not ready to solve the many problems that a big organization would run into? And all the schedule constraints that come with it?
> Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...<p>That's true, but only partly true. It already <i>was</i> a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases right from the start.<p>Rob Rix noted the following 10 years ago:<p><i>Swift is a crescendo of special cases stopping just short of the general; the result is complexity in the semantics, complexity in the behaviour (i.e. bugs), and complexity in use (i.e. workarounds).</i><p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Which-features-overcomplicate-Swift-What-should-be-removed?share=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Which-features-overcomplicate-Swift-Wh...</a><p>Me, 2014:<p><i>Apple's new Swift language has taken a page from the C++ and Java playbooks and made initialization a special case. Well, lots of special cases actually. The Swift book has 30 pages on initialization, and they aren't just illustration and explanation, they are dense with rules and special cases</i><p><a href="https://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/remove-features-for-greater-power-aka.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/remove-features-for-grea...</a><p>Of course, that doesn't mean that it didn't get worse. It got <i>lot</i> worse. For example (me again, 2020):<p><i>I was really surprised to learn that Swift recently adopted Smalltalk keyword syntax ... Of course, Swift wouldn't be Swift if this weren't a special case of a special case, specifically the case of multiple trailing closures, which is a special case of trailing closures, which are weird and special-casey enough by themselves.</i><p><a href="https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/06/the-curious-case-of-swift-adoption-of.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/06/the-curious-case-of-swif...</a><p>Oh, and Function Builders (2020, also me):<p><i>A prediction I made was that these rules, despite or more likely because of their complexity, would not be sufficient. And that turned out to be correct, as predicted, people turned to workarounds, just like they did with C++ and Java constructors.</i><p><a href="https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/04/swift-initialization-swiftui-and.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/04/swift-initialization-swi...</a><p>So it is true that it is now bad and that it has gotten worse. It's just not the case that it was ever simple to start with. And the further explosion of complexity was not some accidental thing that happened to what was otherwise a good beginning. That very explosion was already pretty much predetermined in the language as it existed from inception and in the values that were visible.<p>From my exchange with Chris regarding initializers:<p>"Chris Lattner said...<p>Marcel, I totally agree with your simplicity goal, but this isn't practical unless you are willing to sacrifice non-default initializable types (e.g. non-nullable pointers) or memory safety."<p>Part of my response:<p>"Let me turn it around: Chris, I totally agree with your goal of initializable types, but it is just not practical unless you are willing to sacrifice simplicity, parsimony and power (and ignore the fact that it doesn't actually work)."<p>Simplicity is not the easy option. Simplicity is <i>hard</i>. Swift took the easy route.<p><i>[...] when you first attack a problem it seems really simple because you don't understand it. Then when you start to really understand it, you come up with these very complicated solutions because it's really hairy. Most people stop there. But a few people keep burning the midnight oil and finally understand the underlying principles of the problem and come up with an elegantly simple solution for it. But very few people go the distance to get there.</i><p>-- Steve Jobs (borrowed and adapted from Heinelein)<p><a href="https://blog.metaobject.com/2014/04/sophisticated-simplicity.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.metaobject.com/2014/04/sophisticated-simplicity...</a>
To be fair, I think such a fate in inevitable for most languages after many years of changes and development.
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The thing what people don't get with C++'s complexity is that complexity is unavoidable.<p>It is also there in Ada, C#, Java, Python, Common Lisp,....<p>Even if the languages started tiny, complexity eventually grows on them.<p>C23 + compiler extensions is quite far from where K&R C was.<p>Scheme R7 is quite far from where Scheme started.<p>Go's warts are directly related to ignoring history of growing pains from other ecosystems.
> Even if the languages started tiny, complexity eventually grows on them.<p>And then of course the case that proves the opposite, Clojure. Sure, new ideas appear, but core language is more or less unchanged since introduced, rock solid and decades old projects still run just fine, although usually a bit faster.
> Swift could have easily dethroned Python.<p>Just IMO, but... no. To me a "could have easily" requires n-1 things to have happened, and 1 thing not happening. Like, we "could have easily" had a nuclear exchange with the USSR, were it not for the ONE Russian guy who decided to wait for more evidence. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...</a><p>But even in '15-'17, there were too many people doing too many things with Python (the big shift to data orientation started in the mid/late 90's which paved the way to ML and massive python usage) by then.<p>The 'n' was large, and not nearly of the 'n' things were in Swift's favor then.<p>Again, IMO.
That's my read too.<p>Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++.<p>...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a small amount of what the Swift language does actually needs to be part of the <i>language</i>.
I get this feeling with C#. I have been here since its release. I looked at Swift and then they moved very quickly at the beginning, so the book I had to teach me was out of date moments after it was printed. With all the complexity being thrown in, I stuck with C++ because at least it was only 1 language I had to keep track of (barely)!
C# is the other direction, IMO.<p>I've been using C# since the first release in 2003/4 timeline?<p>Aside from a few high profile language features like LINQ, generics, `async/await`, the <i>syntax</i> has grown, but the key additions have made the language simpler to use and more terse. Tuples and destructuring for example. Spread operators for collections. Switch expressions and pattern matching. These are mostly syntactic affordances.<p>You don't have to use any of them; you can write C# exactly as you wrote it in 2003...if you want to. But I'm not sure why one would forgo the improved terseness of modern C#.<p>Next big language addition will be discriminated unions and even that is really "opt-in" if you want to use it.
Which keywords would you get rid of and why? You don't have to use all of them!
I would remove result builders and all other uses of @attributes that change the semantics of the code (e.g property wrappers).<p>I would remove the distinction between value types and reference types at the type level. This has caused so many bugs in my code. This distinction should be made where the types are used not where they are defined.<p>I would remove everything related to concurrency from the language itself. The idea to let code execute on random threads without any explicit hint at the call site is ridiculous. It's far too complicated and error prone, which is why Swift designers had to radically change the defaults between Swift 6.0 and 6.2 and it's still a mess.<p>I would remove properties that are really functions (and of course property wrappers). I want to see at the call site whether I'm calling a function or accessing a variable.<p>I would probably remove async/await as well, but this is a broader debate beyond Swift.<p>And yes you absolutely do have to know and use all features that a language has, especially if it's a corporate language where features are introduced in order to support platform APIs.
I agree with you about result builders, silly feature that only exists for SwiftUI.<p>But a lot of what you said, except for the concurrency and property wrapper stuff, largely exists for Obj-C interop. The generated interface is more readable, and swift structs act like const C structs. It’s nice.
I'm not a Swift user, but I can tell you from C++ experience that this logic doesn't mitigate a complex programming language.<p>* If you're in a team (or reading code in a third-party repo) then you need to know whatever features are used in that code, even if they're not in "your" subset of the language.<p>* Different codebases using different subsets of the language can feel quite different, which is annoying even if you know all the features used in them.<p>* Even if you're writing code entirely on your own, you still end up needing to learn about more language features than you need to for your code in order that you can make an informed decision about what goes in "your" subset.
But you have to <i>know</i> all of them to read other people's code.<p>To answer your question: I would immediately get rid of <i>guard</i>.<p>Also, I think the complexity and interplay of structs, classes, enums, protocols and now actors is staggering.
I'm surprised, guard is really useful, especially when unwrapping optionals. It's terse, explicit and encourages defensive programming.<p>internal should definitely go though.
i would get rid of associatedtype, borrowing, consuming, deinit, extension, fileprivate, init, inout, internal, nonisolated, open, operator, precedencegroup, protocol, rethrows, subscript, typealias, #available, #colorLiteral, #else, #elseif, #endif, #fileLiteral, #if, #imageLiteral, #keyPath, #selector, #sourceLocation, #unavailable, associativity, convenience, didSet, dynamic, indirect, infix, lazy, left, mutating, nonmutating, postfix, precedence, prefix, right, unowned, weak, and willSet
It's true that internal is pointless.<p>Focusing on the keywords rather than the macros, I think the rest of them have legitimate use cases, though they're often misused, especially fileprivate.
You can take this approach in personal projects - with teams you need to decide on this and then on-board people into your use of the language. This does not work.
1. You don't have to use it all, but someone will. And there are <i>over 200</i> keywords in the language: <a href="https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183</a><p>2. On top of that many of the features in the language exist not because they were carefully designed, but because they were rushed: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529006">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529006</a>
That number is unfairly exaggerated. The list includes ~40 internal keywords used only by language developers, plus dozens of tokens that would be called preprocessor directives, attributes, or annotations in other languages (e.g. `canImport` as in `#if canImport(...) #endif`; `available` and `deprecated` as in `@available(*, deprecated) func`).
are there actually 217 keywords? Just wondering what the difference between that file and <a href="https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/lexicalstructure/#Keywords-and-Punctuation" rel="nofollow">https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...</a> (a mere 102 keywords)
That file is the compiler's list of reserved keywords, so some of them may not have been added to docs, or they're experimental/internal/...<p>I'm not 100% sure but I think the swift doc you linked is missing at least a dozen keywords so the truth probably lies in the middle
Ah makes sense, personally I wouldn't consider reserved but unused words as keywords in the sense that you don't need to know them to read the language (even though they're keywords in some other technical sense). I was curious because I just tried counting number of keywords by language and it seemed surprisingly ambiguous/subjective/up to the language to say what's a "keyword" vs some type of core module. So my attempt (<a href="https://correctarity.com/keywords" rel="nofollow">https://correctarity.com/keywords</a>) probably has mistakes...
I felt that too many smart people were getting involved in the evolution of the language. There should have been a benevolent dictator to say NO.
> <i>Haven't used it since v3 though.</i><p>Since 5.10 it's been worth picking back up if you're on MacOS.
>"around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python."<p>NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Pytorch are what drove the mass adoption of Python over the last few years. No language feature could touch those libraries. I now know how the C++/Java people felt when JS started taking over. It's a nightmare to watch a joke language (literally; Python being named for Monty Python) become the default simply because of platform limitations.
Eh, I don't think Swift would ever have dethroned Python. What pain point would it practically solve? I don't use Python often but I don't hear folks complaining about it much.<p>I do, though, think Swift had/has(?) a chance to dethrone Rust in the non-garbage collected space. Rust is incredibly powerful but sometimes you don't really need that complexity, you just need something that can compile cross-platform and maintain great performance. Before now I've written Rust projects that heavily use Rc<> just so I don't have to spend forever thinking about lifetimes, when I do that I think "I wish I could just use Swift for this" sometimes.<p>You're right, though, that Swift remains Apple's language and they don't have a lot of interest in non-Apple uses of it (e.g. Swift SDK for Android was only released late last year). They're much happier to bend the language in weird ways to create things like SwiftUI.
> Swift could have easily dethroned Python<p>No way something that compiles as slowly as Swift dethrones Python.<p>Edit: Plus Swift goes directly against the Zen of Python<p>> Explicit is better than implicit.<p>> Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!<p>coupled with shitty LSP support (even to this day) makes code even harder to understand than when you `import *` in Python.<p>Edit 2: To expand a little on how shitty the LSP support is for those who don't work with Swift: any trivial iOS or macOS project that builds fine in Xcode can have a bunch of SourceKit-LSP (the official Swift LSP) errors because it fails to resolve frameworks/libraries. The only sane way to work with Swift in VS Code or derivatives I've found is to turn off SourceKit diagnostics altogether and only keep swiftc diagnostics. And I have the swift-lsp plugin in Claude Code, there's a routine baseline of SourceKit errors ignored. So you have symbols without explicit namespaces, and the LSP simply can't resolve lots of them, so no lookup for you. Good luck.
>No way something that compiles as slowly as Swift dethrones Python.<p>This must have pushed Chris Lattner towards making Mojo both interpreted and compiled at the same time.
> Explicit is better than implicit.<p>That's funny. To me magic is implicit by definition and Python strikes me as a very magical language compared to something like Java that is way more explicit.
Until you start using frameworks like Spring and then everything is so painfully magic that no one knows how the program actually runs.
Magical language how? And you should see what reflection based Java monstrosities do in the background.
<i>Plus Swift goes directly against the Zen of Python</i><p>The Zen of Python is how we got crap like argparse where arguments are placed in the namespace instead of a dict.
Dethroned Python? The Apple language, seriously. Where is numpy for swift?
I spent last week (with Opus, of course) porting the xv6-riscv teaching operating system to a bunch of different languages. Zig, Nim, LISP, and Swift.<p>The improvements in embedded Swift have definitely made it one of the most enjoyable/productive languages to work on the OS. I feel like I can build useful abstractions that wrap raw memory access and make the userland code feel very neat.<p>On the other hand, the compilation times are SO bad, that I'm really focusing on the Nim port anyway.
> Swift is designed to be the language you reach for at every layer of the software stack.<p>It's a nice lang for sure, but this will never be true with the way things are. Such wasted opportunity by Apple.
How so? I can indeed target every layer of the software stack using Swift, <i>today</i>.<p>E.g. ClearSurgery[0] is written <i>fully</i> in Swift, including the real-time components running on the Linux boxes.<p>[0] <a href="https://clearsurgery.vision" rel="nofollow">https://clearsurgery.vision</a>
I _can_ do the same with Rust, doesn't mean it's "the language I reach for" for making e.g. a website. Because the tooling, ergonomics, hireability factor, etc. are still very harshly against it.<p>Same with Swift, but I'd call that more of a wasted opportunity because Apple, unlike Rust Foundation, has a mountain of money to make it happen, and yet they don't seem to care.
> They don't seem to care.<p>I don’t believe that’s true. Things are moving constantly, and in the right direction. Then again it would help if you cited particular grievances, because being a regular (cross-platform/cross-target) Swift user I am not sure what you are talking about…<p>I did not choose ClearSurgery’s example randomly. I was at a conference recently where the CTO was here, and he explicitly told us they were moving fast <i>thanks to</i> the Swift ecosystem. (I am not working there personally, nor am I affiliated.)
they seem to be adding more and more keywords<p>if they really want me to use this lang for everything, they'd have to 1. massively improve compilation speed, 2. get the ecosystem going (what's the correct way to spin up an http server like with express?) and 3. get rid of roughly 150 of the 200 keywords there are<p>especially w.r.t. the last one, of course everyone frets at huge breaking changes like this, so it won't happen, so people won't use it
> 3. get rid of roughly 150 of the 200 keywords there are<p>I don't understand this point. Could you explain?<p>The new keywords enable new language features (ex: async/await, any, actor), and these features are opt-in. If you don't want to use them, you don't have to.<p>What are they keywords you think should be removed?
> I don’t believe that’s true. Things are moving constantly, and in the right direction.<p>Hah! I'll use that argument if I ever get PIP'd.<p>No but seriously, constantly moving doesn't mean fast enough. Swift took took long to have cross-platform support.<p>And it is still uberslow to compile. To the point of language servers giving up on analyzing it and timeout.
Not just uber slow to compile, because as a Rust dev I could take that. But it rejects correct programs without telling you why! The compiler will just time out and ask you to refactor so it has a better shot. I understand that kind of pathological behavior is present in many compilers but I hit it way too often in Swift on seemingly benign code.
I don't know why anyone would want to use Apple tools if they are not developing for Apple platforms. Apple barely maintains compatibility for their own platforms, using Swift on a non-Apple platform is setting yourself up for doubule pain.
> Apple barely maintains compatibility for their own platforms...<p>You're commenting on a post about an update... that they apparently don't do? What?
That was true for Swift 2, maybe a little for Swift 3, but it has not been true since a long time now…
In a way it still is true. Swift works on Windows and Linux until it doesn't. It's taken until a couple years ago for other build systems to get swift support (which I suppose is the fault of said build system, but Swift taking so long to be cross-platform contributed to that), and even now it (still) doesn't quite work right. C interop is a mess requiring hacks to generate clang modules to actually get Swift to see them (and CMake for example provides no easy way of doing this, or last time I checked it didn't). Oh and Swift tends to take over the linker and compilation pipelines when you enable it, at least with CMake, because... Reasons? I honestly don't know why. It causes very weird errors when I integrated Swift code into my C++ project that were a pain to actually diagnose. I eventually got it working, but still, it wasn't simple or seamless.
If cross platform support took so long, it's a major red flag.<p>Plus Swift is arguably too unnecessarily complex now.<p>And there's Rust/Zig so why use Swift for low level?
That it's designed for a thing and becoming the go-to choice for that thing can be far apart indeed.
It just works.
One language. Many platforms. Incredible performance.<p>With a simple tooling. No ugly script. Everything is naturally integrated.
No mention of compilation speed improvements? Very unfortunate. Compilation times slower than rust really hampers the devx of this otherwise decent language.
I remember building dylibs in Swift for use in C programs, had to use @cdecl annotation iirc to achieve that, which was experimental. Good to see it's finally official
> Swift 6.3 introduces the @c attribute, which lets you expose Swift functions and enums to C code in your project. Annotating a function or enum with @c prompts Swift to include a corresponding declaration in the generated C header that you can include in your C/C++ files<p>Why did this take so long to be added? Such strange priorities. Adding an entire C++ compiler for C++ interoperability before adding... C exports. Bizarre.
C++ interop got attention because it helps Apple absorb low-level codebases that already moved past pure C. Exporting Swift to plain C mostly means more DIY FFI spaghetti.<p>Once enums, ownership rules, and nullability cross that boundary, the generated header stops looking like a neat bridge and starts looking like one more place for ABI bugs to hide. Closures make it weirder fast, because now your error handling and calling conventions can drift just enough to produce the kind of bug that wastes a whole afernoon.
They had it earlier, as an underscored attribute.
You already had ObjC export so it was arguably low priority given the crossover
it's been there for a while as an experimental feature. I used it in a project
> Swift 6.3 includes the first official release of the Swift SDK for Android.
Anything similar for Windows and Linux?<p>For Windows there's a 5 year old blog post: <a href="https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/</a><p>For Linux there's a guide for GNOME: <a href="https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/</a><p>It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).
Swift on Windows has been part of the official distribution for a long time:<p><a href="https://www.swift.org/install/windows/" rel="nofollow">https://www.swift.org/install/windows/</a>
I haven't shipped any Swift on Windows myself but I have a production Linux system using Swift (and C++ interop) and it works really well
That is going to be used... less than Swift for the servers
Interestingly, Kotlin has a pretty solid cross-platform story.<p>I'd pick it over Swift if targeting Android since it can build and run in the JVM as well as natively -- and has Swift/ObjC interop. Its also very usable on the server if you wanted to, since you can use it in place of Java and tap into the very mature JVM ecosystem. If that's what you're into.<p>And I have a lot more faith in JetBrains being good stewards of the language rather than Apple, who have a weird collection of priorities.
Kotlin is practically a no-brainer when you have JVM at your finger tips, versus something like Swift which is comparatively young.<p>I tried to use Vapor with Swift recently and struggled to get something working because the documentation <i>looked</i> comprehensive, but had a lot of gaps. I ended up throwing it out because I didn't have the time to dig through the source to understand how to do something, when I could use a mature framework in any other language instead.<p>The promise is there but I'm just not ready to invest. My youthful days of unbounded curiosity are coming to an end and these days I just want to get something done without much faff.
Mind you, Kotlin/Native (which is what gets used when you're compiling for iOS) doesn't have access to the JVM.<p>However, the Kotlin community is fundamentally all about open source, whereas Apple & iOS Devs have an allergy to it. The quality and quantity is already miles above the vast majority of what's in the Swift ecosystem. <a href="https://klibs.io" rel="nofollow">https://klibs.io</a> has all the native compatible libs. And if you're targeting a platform where the JVM is available then yeah, it's massive. Compose makes UI tolerable compared to JWT too. Even large projects like Spring are Kotlin first nowadays.
I don't know. Could be nice for those developers that prioritize iOS and now they could keep writing Swift also for Android.<p>Is it gonna be what you primarily use if you wanna write an Android app? Probably not.<p>Is it gonna displace react Native? Probably not. Is it gonna reach the levels of flutter? Maybe.
The language doesn’t really matter. The underlying SDK/framework is where the action is at.<p>However, I suspect that we may not be too far off, from LLMs being the true cross-platform system. You feed the same requirements, with different targets, and it generates full native apps.
> from LLMs being the true cross-platform system<p>Fully agree. I have zero Swift knowledge and currently use LLM to write a native app. I'm well aware of the SDKs and concepts in iOS development, so even if something's wrong I got intuition where to look and how to make the LLM fix it.
I’m not sure about that but porting libraries from one language to another seems well within their capabilities.
> Is it gonna reach the levels of flutter? Maybe.<p>Never. It won’t even reach Compose level, Flutter level DX is unattainable for any framework outside Flutter.
This is going to be used much more than Swift for servers. Swift is a primarily client-side mobile language. It makes sense that you tap into reusing the logic.
Just like .NET for linux... right? RIGHT?
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How is the toolchain? Does Swift Lint and Swift Format support the newest version. Honestly, the modern program language should have the built-in formatter and recommend lint rules. It is not just shipping a program language, it is a while ecosystem.
did they ever add #define? bridging constants from the build system to swift with static NSString * const kConstValue = @XSTR(CONST_VALUE); is soooo annoying.
In an effort to use swift for scripting, without the startup cost:<p>Swift Caching Compiler - <a href="https://github.com/jrz/tools" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jrz/tools</a>
Whats the stdlib situation for swift in comparison to newish languages like go or rust. I know its not batteries included lke python - and doesnt have a massive dev ecosystem of helper libs seeming to be mostly tied to macOS/iOS operating system API/ABI.
As of very recently, the entire stdlib (i.e. "Foundation") is open source and available on all platforms Swift targets. For a while, the Linux builds had a much smaller/limited version of Foundation, but it's fully supported now.
There are still challenges with basics like compression, which tends to involve trawling Github for the least dubious toy project. Even Apple's Compression framework is missing important algorithms like ZSTD.<p>Another problem is the Apache Software Foundation don't seem to have any Swift maintainers, which means there really aren't any good pure Swift libraries for Arrow or Parquet.<p>There are some really good open-source libraries from Apple like Swift Collections or Swift Binary Parsing.
> There are still challenges with basics like compression<p>FWIW, there is an active discussion on this very topic: <a href="https://forums.swift.org/t/proposal-compression-library/85413" rel="nofollow">https://forums.swift.org/t/proposal-compression-library/8541...</a>
A good source of available packages is the Swift Package Index. You can search here packages compatible with Linux[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://swiftpackageindex.com/search?query=platform%3Alinux" rel="nofollow">https://swiftpackageindex.com/search?query=platform%3Alinux</a>
The noncopyable types improvements are the most underrated part of this release. Finally makes it practical to model unique ownership in Swift without fighting the compiler.
>nocopy for disabling copy-to-clipboard<p>Im curious how is this used?
Anyone else think the weather in the screen shot at the top of the page is a bit off? Snow in Lisbon (apparently it snowed there once in 2006), rain in Reykjavik at -1°. AI slop?
Re: module name selectors, wasn't this already possible, e.g. ModuleA.getValue()? Though I suppose this disambiguates if you also have a type called ModuleA.
Swift lives only for macOS,iOS and besides those ecosystems does not have a solid and robust ecosystem to be used for anything else.<p>It's a shame but it for sure needs BigTech for it to be used anywhere else.
My chances of landing at Apple increased when they launched Swift. I am too dumb to learn objective C but swift I can do.
Swift truly is one of the languages of all time. I started a mobile app with the UI built in Swift and the core in Rust. The amount of implicit and hidden behaviour, magical fields being generated on objects because of certain annotations, the massive amount of @decorators...it's too much. I'm going to have an LLM generate the SwiftUI and touch as little of it as possible.<p>It's also strange because before I learned Swift, I heard about how beautiful it is but I find it much noisier than Rust.
I find rust much noisier, especially at its basics where you write “for item in items” instead of using iter()
What are you using for rust-swift interop?
I want to like swift so bad
The Lord's language keeps getting better and better. The easier C interop could not have come at a more serendipitous time in my life.
Lack of Mingw support keeps me away from it, and Odin.
> @c @specialized @inline(always) @export(implementation)<p>Reminds me of "In case you forgot, Swift has 217 keywords now" <a href="https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183</a>
I remember jumping into Swift from Obj-C in 2014 and using words like "beautiful" and "expressive" to describe syntax, and saying things like "you can tell what language someone is coming from by how they code in Swift". Now it's grown as it has - sometimes feels like season 4 of Lost. Makes me feel old too.
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I'm glad Chris Lattner moved on and founded Mojo. It's such a cool language with ton of potential.
Swift reminds me a lot of Flash back in the day.<p>While the Flash guys had to use a native development environment and compile their stuff, I could just edit JavaScript in a plain text file and hit reload.<p>20 years later, and some of the same friends now swear by Swift. And have to use a native development environment and compile their stuff. While I still prefer to just edit JavaScript in a plain text file and hit reload.