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Great to see Swift being used outside of macOS/iOS. Is this increasingly common? Is it worth learning and adopting Swift as an alternative to Rust/Go/Dart, fo

Great to see Swift being used outside of macOS/iOS. Is this increasingly common? Is it worth learning and adopting Swift as an alternative to Rust/Go/Dart, for example? It feels like it could be a strong general purpose language. It seems a shame to restrict the language to Apple's ecosystem only. Apple's own docs make it sound like use cases outside of the Apple ecosystem are being left to the community; that Apple does not have any intention to make the language have broader appeal itself: https://developer.apple.com/swift/#xplatform https://developer.apple.com/swift/#xplatform

dustincoates 7y ago
I was listening to a podcast with Jeremy Howard (of fast.ai) where he was talking about Swift as a language increasingly popular for deep learning. Here's a blog post where he writes about why: https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/ https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/
michaelbrave 7y ago
I believe it's a capable language and I hope to use it more like that in the future. Right now there are things like: -vapor: https://vapor.codes/ https://vapor.codes/ to do server things -tensorflow swift: https://www.tensorflow.org/swift https://www.tensorflow.org/swift for machine learning at a lower level than python, meant to replace a lot of the work that ends up being done in c++ One of the biggest problems is that it isn't as cross platform as we want it to be yet (it kinda works on windows now: https://swiftforwindows.github.io/ https://swiftforwindows.github.io/ - but not for 5.0 yet), some of the more recent changes to the language are setting it up to be more cross platform as well, but I've forgotten the specific term. Also a lot of libraries on linux don't work quite the same as MacOS or are incomplete/missing. The biggest hold-back though that and the public opinion seems to be that swift == IOS dev. The only way I can think to change that opinion is to build something incredible first and then let everyone react with "you can do that? I didn't think you could do that, wow".

dustincoates 7y ago

I was listening to a podcast with Jeremy Howard (of fast.ai) where he was talking about Swift as a language increasingly popular for deep learning. Here's a blog post where he writes about why: https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/ https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/

michaelbrave 7y ago

I believe it's a capable language and I hope to use it more like that in the future. Right now there are things like: -vapor: https://vapor.codes/ https://vapor.codes/ to do server things -tensorflow swift: https://www.tensorflow.org/swift https://www.tensorflow.org/swift for machine learning at a lower level than python, meant to replace a lot of the work that ends up being done in c++ One of the biggest problems is that it isn't as cross platform as we want it to be yet (it kinda works on windows now: https://swiftforwindows.github.io/ https://swiftforwindows.github.io/ - but not for 5.0 yet), some of the more recent changes to the language are setting it up to be more cross platform as well, but I've forgotten the specific term. Also a lot of libraries on linux don't work quite the same as MacOS or are incomplete/missing. The biggest hold-back though that and the public opinion seems to be that swift == IOS dev. The only way I can think to change that opinion is to build something incredible first and then let everyone react with "you can do that? I didn't think you could do that, wow".