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> Swift now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous. Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the l

> Swift now being a 100% Apple-sponsored & owned project again makes me a bit nervous. Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world? > very niche market of 100% native mobile development That "niche" is at least 1.5 billion devices. Devices bought by the 1.5 billion richest people in the world because they like them, not because their employers forced them to. Seems like a pretty ideal "niche". But I wouldn't agree that "swift never worked server side". I've built several backends in Vapor and it's amazing.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
> Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world? Yes, I am. The concentration of power between facebook and google for ML frameworks is worrying enough, but to their credit, they have so far been very open and collaborative and are giving a lot back to the ML community in terms of research Apple on the other hand is the dictionary definition of walled garden. Their controlling and insular nature has been the reason for their success, and power to them, but for something as fast moving and community driven as machine learning, I would be very wary if relying on them for any part of it.
- jamil7 6y ago
  I think there is too much focus on Swift as a general purpose language. I really enjoy working in it and it’s great at what it does, does it have to be deployed in every domain?
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    That was Chris Lattner's original dream at least, but I suppose it can remain viable even if it is "only" used on Apple's billion+ devices.
- samatman 6y ago
  This is so bizarre to me. What possible future are you trying to ward off here? Swift is an open-source project, it's self-evidently in Apple's interest for as many people as possible to use it. Be concrete, please. What scares you about using an open-source language which is mostly developed by Apple? Do you have the same paranoia about clang? If not, why not, what's the difference?
forgot-my-pw 6y ago
The Uber engineering disaster story from 2 months ago seems to suggest that Apple lacks dogfooding Swift internally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Apple is using Swift everywhere. Including SwiftUI.
- azinman2 6y ago
  iOS doesn't come as 100mb cellular downloads, so that isn't really the same kind of issue. There are many reports about showing how it's slowly coming into wider spread use at Apple. For me the lesson is that just because a new technology/language is out doesn't mean you should jump on it. Things need time to mature, and if you're Uber, you can't risk having half of your income rely on something new. Compilers, linkers, and programming languages (and databases and OS kernels) take years to mature. Hell, just earlier this week was a post about diagnosing a 21 year old bug in the Linux networking stack for rsync of all things. I'm quite shocked that enough experienced people felt that level of confidence. In earlier versions of Swift I personally experience slow compiles and that was on a not terribly large code base -- no where near Uber. That alone should have been a big clue of the state of things.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  More like Uber spent too little time trying to keep their app development process manageable.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Uber doesn't have any pressure to have a reasonable tech stack because they don't have to be profitable (because they're an investor charity). On the other hand, having a fancy tech stack helps with recruiting.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

> Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world? Yes, I am. The concentration of power between facebook and google for ML frameworks is worrying enough, but to their credit, they have so far been very open and collaborative and are giving a lot back to the ML community in terms of research Apple on the other hand is the dictionary definition of walled garden. Their controlling and insular nature has been the reason for their success, and power to them, but for something as fast moving and community driven as machine learning, I would be very wary if relying on them for any part of it.

jamil7 6y ago
I think there is too much focus on Swift as a general purpose language. I really enjoy working in it and it’s great at what it does, does it have to be deployed in every domain?
- Grustaf 6y ago
  That was Chris Lattner's original dream at least, but I suppose it can remain viable even if it is "only" used on Apple's billion+ devices.
samatman 6y ago
This is so bizarre to me. What possible future are you trying to ward off here? Swift is an open-source project, it's self-evidently in Apple's interest for as many people as possible to use it. Be concrete, please. What scares you about using an open-source language which is mostly developed by Apple? Do you have the same paranoia about clang? If not, why not, what's the difference?

forgot-my-pw 6y ago

The Uber engineering disaster story from 2 months ago seems to suggest that Apple lacks dogfooding Swift internally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373462

Grustaf 6y ago
Apple is using Swift everywhere. Including SwiftUI.
azinman2 6y ago
iOS doesn't come as 100mb cellular downloads, so that isn't really the same kind of issue. There are many reports about showing how it's slowly coming into wider spread use at Apple. For me the lesson is that just because a new technology/language is out doesn't mean you should jump on it. Things need time to mature, and if you're Uber, you can't risk having half of your income rely on something new. Compilers, linkers, and programming languages (and databases and OS kernels) take years to mature. Hell, just earlier this week was a post about diagnosing a 21 year old bug in the Linux networking stack for rsync of all things. I'm quite shocked that enough experienced people felt that level of confidence. In earlier versions of Swift I personally experience slow compiles and that was on a not terribly large code base -- no where near Uber. That alone should have been a big clue of the state of things.
saagarjha 6y ago
More like Uber spent too little time trying to keep their app development process manageable.
- astrange 6y ago
  Uber doesn't have any pressure to have a reasonable tech stack because they don't have to be profitable (because they're an investor charity). On the other hand, having a fancy tech stack helps with recruiting.