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As great as jetbrains is, I think Swift has much better long term potential in terms of FOSS tools. The Swift language server Apple is currently working should

As great as jetbrains is, I think Swift has much better long term potential in terms of FOSS tools. The Swift language server Apple is currently working should bring an open tooling avalanche. In fact I think the high quality of jetbrains IDEs might actually impede Kotlin tooling development… why bother when first party tools are so good?

oblio 8y ago
The thing is, developers outside of Apple platforms don't really adopt Apple techs. Objective C never took off and the same seems to be happening to Swift. I don't know anyone using it on Linux.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Objective-C’s cross platform use was crippled due to half of its essentials being tied up in Cocoa. Objective-C by itself doesn’t even have memory management. Swift doesn’t suffer this issue — it’s been built for multiplatform use from day 1. There are still some discrepancies, but today Swift on Linux is about as usable as Swift on Apple platforms. There’s even several (4+ last I checked) modern web frameworks for Swift and even GTK+ bindings. On top of this, its Windows port recently reached a useable state and there’s work being done on a Win32 bindings. Once that’s done, it will be possible to write an app with a common core and 3 different UI layers all in Swift which connects to a web API written in Swift. That’s already leagues beyond what was ever achieved with Obj-C and momentum is continuing to build.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Swift on Linux is about as usable as Swift on Apple platforms Eh, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t see it significantly ahead of say GNUstep is for Objective-C; Swift on any platform other than macOS is still pretty much a second-class experience.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Ok. But the questions now is: why would you adopt it? You could use Java/OpenJDK or even Kotlin/OpenJDK. You could use dotnet core. You could use Node.js with Typescript. Or Python/Ruby/PHP/... All those are mature and support all major operating systems way better than Swift does. I'm not sure what Swift's Unique Selling Proposition is. From where I'm looking it seems to be: "it's backed by Apple".

oblio 8y ago

The thing is, developers outside of Apple platforms don't really adopt Apple techs. Objective C never took off and the same seems to be happening to Swift. I don't know anyone using it on Linux.

kitsunesoba 8y ago
Objective-C’s cross platform use was crippled due to half of its essentials being tied up in Cocoa. Objective-C by itself doesn’t even have memory management. Swift doesn’t suffer this issue — it’s been built for multiplatform use from day 1. There are still some discrepancies, but today Swift on Linux is about as usable as Swift on Apple platforms. There’s even several (4+ last I checked) modern web frameworks for Swift and even GTK+ bindings. On top of this, its Windows port recently reached a useable state and there’s work being done on a Win32 bindings. Once that’s done, it will be possible to write an app with a common core and 3 different UI layers all in Swift which connects to a web API written in Swift. That’s already leagues beyond what was ever achieved with Obj-C and momentum is continuing to build.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Swift on Linux is about as usable as Swift on Apple platforms Eh, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t see it significantly ahead of say GNUstep is for Objective-C; Swift on any platform other than macOS is still pretty much a second-class experience.
- oblio 8y ago
  Ok. But the questions now is: why would you adopt it? You could use Java/OpenJDK or even Kotlin/OpenJDK. You could use dotnet core. You could use Node.js with Typescript. Or Python/Ruby/PHP/... All those are mature and support all major operating systems way better than Swift does. I'm not sure what Swift's Unique Selling Proposition is. From where I'm looking it seems to be: "it's backed by Apple".