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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

by uhura 2y ago

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.

VWWHFSfQ 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago
    Scooby doo meme <Open source contributor> “let’s see who you really are”. <pulls off mask>. Apple employee.
    - bastardoperator 2y ago
      All 1100+ contributors are Apple employees?…
      - truncate 2y ago
        Are 1100+ contributors active contributors and/or actually making non-trivial changes?
    - vips7L 2y ago
      Does it matter? Most commits to OpenJdk are Oracle employees and most committees to C# or typescript are Microsoft employees.
- threeseed 2y ago
  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.
  - kennywinker 2y ago
    > 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. I think you might have this backwards. What you say used to be true back in the days of phonegap, where the hardware was abstracted far away, but all of the frameworks you mention provide pretty easy paths to access new APIs and hardware features. But companies that are drawn to cross-platform tooling already want a uniform experience across devices - and that's why you get the lowest common denominator being used with tools like react native.
- virgil_disgr4ce 2y ago
  > 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.
  - hu3 2y ago
    Xcode as an example of quality? It's atrocious from my experience. Updates tied to OS and crashes more than it should.
eastbound 2y ago
The goal is probably rather to allow CI on the cloud. Many companies are ok with open source licenses.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  No, because it calls out to tools which are not open source.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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.
  - hu3 2y ago
    > people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms. This is a rather small userbase when it comes to enterprise. Especially because Swift will never be as versatile as Python or as efficient as Rust. And then there's also Go, C# and Kotlin with much better tooling.
    - privacyis1mp 2y ago
      Xcode gives me such a hard time that I started considering writing in Kotlin for macOS, just to have a normal IDE. We used to have AppCode (from JetBrains) and it was great. I wonder why Apple didn't support JetBrains, after all, it would have been to Apple's benefit.
      - 2y ago
kelnos 2y ago
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.
- codr7 2y ago
  Sorry to hear that, I wouldn't bet anything on Apple but the core language contains a lot of good ideas imho.
  - moooo99 2y ago
    I’ve spent some time looking into swift as well and was quite pleased with the overall language, it really contained some really good ideas. This makes it a bit of a shame that it is tied so closely to Apple
  - nwienert 2y ago
    Seems lovely but headed in a Scala-like bloated direction. The "too complex" type issues were really bad last I tried. And one of my biggest gripes is the way you can extend things from anywhere else, easy to cause a mess.
    - metaltyphoon 2y ago
      Swift is getting out of hand after Chris left and Swift UI was introduced. The language has over 210 keywords… thats crazy
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Keywords are a bad way to judge a language.
        2y ago
talldayo 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Lattner hasn't been working at Apple since 2017.
- raminf 2y ago
  Lattner left Apple a long while ago. He's been working on Mojo, a different (Pythonic) language and runtime: https://www.modular.com https://www.modular.com
WillAdams 2y ago
For folks who want opensource there is always Gnustep and Gorm/ProjectCenter.app.
myko 2y ago
Simply open sourcing major frameworks like SwiftUI would go a long way to making it usable
jitl 2y ago
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.
- gruuuk 2y ago
  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.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Is it dying? I think it's still pretty popular for app development isn't it? I was pretty excited to hear that Ladybird is doing a lot of stuff in Swift, because I think it's a pretty decent and fast language and I think it'd be pretty neat to see a browser written in it.
    - flohofwoe 2y ago
      It's essentially "Big in Japan" (eg on Apple platforms but nowhere else). Even on Apple platforms I winder if ObjC is actually still more popular ;)
      - Longhanks 2y ago
        Well if you wonder you should conduct some simple research, but be prepared to have your opinion challenged. Swift ist doing very fine and much more popular than ObjC (again, if you don't believe it, invest 5 minutes into research).
pmarreck 2y ago
> 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?
raincole 2y ago
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".

by uhura 2y ago

VWWHFSfQ 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago
  Scooby doo meme <Open source contributor> “let’s see who you really are”. <pulls off mask>. Apple employee.
  - bastardoperator 2y ago
    All 1100+ contributors are Apple employees?…
    - truncate 2y ago
      Are 1100+ contributors active contributors and/or actually making non-trivial changes?
  - vips7L 2y ago
    Does it matter? Most commits to OpenJdk are Oracle employees and most committees to C# or typescript are Microsoft employees.
threeseed 2y ago
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.
- kennywinker 2y ago
  > 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. I think you might have this backwards. What you say used to be true back in the days of phonegap, where the hardware was abstracted far away, but all of the frameworks you mention provide pretty easy paths to access new APIs and hardware features. But companies that are drawn to cross-platform tooling already want a uniform experience across devices - and that's why you get the lowest common denominator being used with tools like react native.
virgil_disgr4ce 2y ago
> 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.
- hu3 2y ago
  Xcode as an example of quality? It's atrocious from my experience. Updates tied to OS and crashes more than it should.

eastbound 2y ago

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

saagarjha 2y ago
No, because it calls out to tools which are not open source.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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.
- hu3 2y ago
  > people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms. This is a rather small userbase when it comes to enterprise. Especially because Swift will never be as versatile as Python or as efficient as Rust. And then there's also Go, C# and Kotlin with much better tooling.
  - privacyis1mp 2y ago
    Xcode gives me such a hard time that I started considering writing in Kotlin for macOS, just to have a normal IDE. We used to have AppCode (from JetBrains) and it was great. I wonder why Apple didn't support JetBrains, after all, it would have been to Apple's benefit.
    - 2y ago

kelnos 2y ago

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.

codr7 2y ago
Sorry to hear that, I wouldn't bet anything on Apple but the core language contains a lot of good ideas imho.
- moooo99 2y ago
  I’ve spent some time looking into swift as well and was quite pleased with the overall language, it really contained some really good ideas. This makes it a bit of a shame that it is tied so closely to Apple
- nwienert 2y ago
  Seems lovely but headed in a Scala-like bloated direction. The "too complex" type issues were really bad last I tried. And one of my biggest gripes is the way you can extend things from anywhere else, easy to cause a mess.
  - metaltyphoon 2y ago
    Swift is getting out of hand after Chris left and Swift UI was introduced. The language has over 210 keywords… thats crazy
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Keywords are a bad way to judge a language.
      - 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago

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 2y ago
Lattner hasn't been working at Apple since 2017.
raminf 2y ago
Lattner left Apple a long while ago. He's been working on Mojo, a different (Pythonic) language and runtime: https://www.modular.com https://www.modular.com

WillAdams 2y ago

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

myko 2y ago

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

jitl 2y ago

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.

gruuuk 2y ago
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.
- tombert 2y ago
  Is it dying? I think it's still pretty popular for app development isn't it? I was pretty excited to hear that Ladybird is doing a lot of stuff in Swift, because I think it's a pretty decent and fast language and I think it'd be pretty neat to see a browser written in it.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    It's essentially "Big in Japan" (eg on Apple platforms but nowhere else). Even on Apple platforms I winder if ObjC is actually still more popular ;)
    - Longhanks 2y ago
      Well if you wonder you should conduct some simple research, but be prepared to have your opinion challenged. Swift ist doing very fine and much more popular than ObjC (again, if you don't believe it, invest 5 minutes into research).

pmarreck 2y ago

> 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?

raincole 2y ago

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".