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I don't think there's any world where Swift is popular outside Apple's ecosystem. It's not anything wrong with the language that's the problem, it's that the pr

by chc 7y ago

I don't think there's any world where Swift is popular outside Apple's ecosystem. It's not anything wrong with the language that's the problem, it's that the primary reason you'd use Swift over similar languages like Rust or Nim is its integration into Apple's ecosystem. It has some unique features outside of that, but not enough to make up for how deep in the wilderness you'd be running Swift on non-Apple platforms. Rust, for example, is probably more complex then Swift — but I'd still choose it over Swift for cross-platform development because the language has a strong cross-platform story.

skohan 7y ago
> I don't think there's any world where Swift is popular outside Apple's ecosystem. I wouldn't go quite that far. I agree that Swift's cross-platform story is lacking, but as someone who follows the language closely, the story is improving all the time. I see it as largely a chicken-and-egg problem: i.e. there's not enough activity outside the Apple ecosystem to improve the situation quickly, but I don't think it's impossible for it to get there. For instance, it's already possible to use Swift in AWS Lambda, and some support for Azure's alternative offering, as well as Google's work on Swift for Tensorflow. All of these cases involve running Swift code in a very controlled environment, like a container, and this is very tenable even in Swift's current state. So even if it might be a bit of a pain to get Swift up and running on whatever exotic linux distro you run on your workstation, there are already starting to be some "easy" use-cases for Swift outside of Apple platforms. As the scope of these one-off use-cases grows, I think it's likely there will be increased demand to improve the cross-platform story in general. Personally this is appealing to me, because while I agree that Rust is miles ahead in terms of cross-platform support, I find Swift so much more productive and pleasant to work with that I welcome more opportunities to use it.

by chc 7y ago

skohan 7y ago

> I don't think there's any world where Swift is popular outside Apple's ecosystem. I wouldn't go quite that far. I agree that Swift's cross-platform story is lacking, but as someone who follows the language closely, the story is improving all the time. I see it as largely a chicken-and-egg problem: i.e. there's not enough activity outside the Apple ecosystem to improve the situation quickly, but I don't think it's impossible for it to get there. For instance, it's already possible to use Swift in AWS Lambda, and some support for Azure's alternative offering, as well as Google's work on Swift for Tensorflow. All of these cases involve running Swift code in a very controlled environment, like a container, and this is very tenable even in Swift's current state. So even if it might be a bit of a pain to get Swift up and running on whatever exotic linux distro you run on your workstation, there are already starting to be some "easy" use-cases for Swift outside of Apple platforms. As the scope of these one-off use-cases grows, I think it's likely there will be increased demand to improve the cross-platform story in general. Personally this is appealing to me, because while I agree that Rust is miles ahead in terms of cross-platform support, I find Swift so much more productive and pleasant to work with that I welcome more opportunities to use it.