> So let me tell you, as someone who was a very active member of the community when these features were announced, this is not what that felt like. I, like the

> So let me tell you, as someone who was a very active member of the community when these features were announced, this is not what that felt like. I, like the rest of the community, found out about function builders by noticing code presented on a slide at WWDC which would not compile under the then-current version of Swift. There was then a large debate within the community, where members of the core team presented post-hoc rationalizations about how "Swift was always intended as a language which would support DSL's and declarative programming". But the message was clear - this feature was going into the language, with zero prior community review or input, because it was required for the business goals of Apple. Yes, and this is one of the reasons that having well defined walls (and having names for those) is really important for commercially-backed open source projects. It is perhaps clearer to say there is Swift, the language and open source implementation which has an open process for contributing changes. Then there is Apple iSwift, a vendor fork of that language, still open source, that Apple uses to leverage Swift for their platforms. This is similar to the relationship Apple has with clang and used to have with gcc (writing their own precompiled headers and blocks features back in the day, plus objective C itself at one time). Function Builders were added to iSwift, and then Apple spent over a year getting it into the Swift language proper. Changes which affected the syntax of a mainline Swift feature were not off the table, although it would have affected the timeline of Apple being able to migrate developers to it.