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I love Swift and it's potential for use cases beyond just iOS ecosystem, but I think Apple never fostered or encouraged the open source community to involve in

I love Swift and it's potential for use cases beyond just iOS ecosystem, but I think Apple never fostered or encouraged the open source community to involve in its development. It's another classic example where it's simply not enough to open source something, you have to really allow and encourage the developers to contribute to increase the adoption.

Hamuko 6y ago
What's Apple's incentive to do so?
- darzu 6y ago
  Same as MSFT's with C#?
- skohan 6y ago
  Theoretically if Swift was an extremely marketable language across many domains, there would be more qualified developers available to work on software for Apple products.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    But hasn't Apple managed to force a lot of developers to pick up the language anyways?
    - skohan 6y ago
      Apple is one of the most successful organizations on the planet, and yes they have plenty of developers in tow. I am just trying to give an example of how it could help their bottom line to push open source swift more aggressively. If I had to guess, they don't do it because: 1. they don't think the resources it would take would represent a good ROI, 2. and/or they think it's good for them that developers who invest in their ecosystem have skills which are not transferrable to other domains
skohan 6y ago
I was active in the Swift language community for a couple years, and I think it was not just a lack of encouragement, but rather a sense of neglect of use-cases outside the Apple ecosystem. For instance, maybe it's fixed now, but for years running the Swift REPL on linux would spit out a few error messages every time you ran it. It still worked, but it gave the impression of being poorly supported. What really killed it for me was the rollout of features like FunctionBuilders (now result builders) and property wrappers. These were just basically crammed into the language in a half-finished state with no community review, to support the requirements for SwiftUI, despite many other features languishing for years and not being implemented due to concerns about how they would affect swift's "design space". Following that, I had the impression that Swift was and would always be prioritized towards Apple's goals, and any use-case outside of this would be a distant follower.
timtimmy 6y ago
I'm excited about a few projects bringing Swift to other platforms. SwiftWasm is surprisingly painless to get working [1]. Tokamak is an early stage SwiftUI-compatible framework for building web apps [2]. It also has the goal of supporting other native platforms and to that end there is early work on a GTK backend. I have no affiliation with these projects, though I would like to contribute to them at some point. [1] https://swiftwasm.org/ https://swiftwasm.org/ [2] https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

Hamuko 6y ago

What's Apple's incentive to do so?

darzu 6y ago
Same as MSFT's with C#?
skohan 6y ago
Theoretically if Swift was an extremely marketable language across many domains, there would be more qualified developers available to work on software for Apple products.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  But hasn't Apple managed to force a lot of developers to pick up the language anyways?
  - skohan 6y ago
    Apple is one of the most successful organizations on the planet, and yes they have plenty of developers in tow. I am just trying to give an example of how it could help their bottom line to push open source swift more aggressively. If I had to guess, they don't do it because: 1. they don't think the resources it would take would represent a good ROI, 2. and/or they think it's good for them that developers who invest in their ecosystem have skills which are not transferrable to other domains

skohan 6y ago

I was active in the Swift language community for a couple years, and I think it was not just a lack of encouragement, but rather a sense of neglect of use-cases outside the Apple ecosystem. For instance, maybe it's fixed now, but for years running the Swift REPL on linux would spit out a few error messages every time you ran it. It still worked, but it gave the impression of being poorly supported. What really killed it for me was the rollout of features like FunctionBuilders (now result builders) and property wrappers. These were just basically crammed into the language in a half-finished state with no community review, to support the requirements for SwiftUI, despite many other features languishing for years and not being implemented due to concerns about how they would affect swift's "design space". Following that, I had the impression that Swift was and would always be prioritized towards Apple's goals, and any use-case outside of this would be a distant follower.

timtimmy 6y ago

I'm excited about a few projects bringing Swift to other platforms. SwiftWasm is surprisingly painless to get working [1]. Tokamak is an early stage SwiftUI-compatible framework for building web apps [2]. It also has the goal of supporting other native platforms and to that end there is early work on a GTK backend. I have no affiliation with these projects, though I would like to contribute to them at some point. [1] https://swiftwasm.org/ https://swiftwasm.org/ [2] https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak