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there are definitely a few problems crippling swift adoption in the mobile app dev community (which seems like the easier market for growth) but to me the most

by bsaul 5y ago

there are definitely a few problems crippling swift adoption in the mobile app dev community (which seems like the easier market for growth) but to me the most important one is this: it's still a apple frontend PL only. There are absolutely no story for cross-platform development, not even business logic (foundation on android is non-existent). After 18 months developping a first version of an app using swift ( for optimal performance and OS integration) i am now investigating more seriously the different options for reusing the maximum amount of code, and so far the result is : 0. 0 code reuse in today's world is absolutely unbearable. I'm at the point where i'm seriously thinking about tools for automatically converting the code to kotlin.

simonh 5y ago
I really don't see this as an issue to be honest. Swift is the first class native development language for the Apple ecosystem, (eventually) superseding Objective-C. That's it's one job. Anything beyond that is a bonus. I don't expect Google to port the Android runtime, SDK and tooling to iOS either.
- b3morales 5y ago
  That's probably the view of Apple execs, but it is not the rhetoric that comes out of the Swift Org itself: https://www.swift.org/ https://www.swift.org/ > a programming language to empower everyone to turn their ideas into apps on any platform. https://www.swift.org/about/ https://www.swift.org/about/ > the best available language for uses ranging from systems programming, to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services > a web-based REPL can when working with Linux server-side code > it is now free to be ported across a wide range of platforms, devices, and use cases. Our goal is to provide source compatibility for Swift across all platforms ... extend the cross-platform capabilities of Swift ... source compatibility for Swift code across all platforms ... > Open-source Swift can be used on Linux to build Swift libraries and applications > We’d love your help to bring Swift to even more computing platforms.
- bsaul 5y ago
  Except google chose kotlin which is developped by another company, which itself has interest to widen the language support to the maximum. As a consequence we have kotlin native and kotlin multiplatform. Apple used an 100% in-house solution but with the official long-term of having it run on the widest range of platform, and an open-source model. In reality, the language is driven toward things nobody gives a damn (swiftUI would have been almost just as good without the syntax sugar), whereas the official initial goals don't have any steam from Apple.

by bsaul 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

I really don't see this as an issue to be honest. Swift is the first class native development language for the Apple ecosystem, (eventually) superseding Objective-C. That's it's one job. Anything beyond that is a bonus. I don't expect Google to port the Android runtime, SDK and tooling to iOS either.

b3morales 5y ago
That's probably the view of Apple execs, but it is not the rhetoric that comes out of the Swift Org itself: https://www.swift.org/ https://www.swift.org/ > a programming language to empower everyone to turn their ideas into apps on any platform. https://www.swift.org/about/ https://www.swift.org/about/ > the best available language for uses ranging from systems programming, to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services > a web-based REPL can when working with Linux server-side code > it is now free to be ported across a wide range of platforms, devices, and use cases. Our goal is to provide source compatibility for Swift across all platforms ... extend the cross-platform capabilities of Swift ... source compatibility for Swift code across all platforms ... > Open-source Swift can be used on Linux to build Swift libraries and applications > We’d love your help to bring Swift to even more computing platforms.
bsaul 5y ago
Except google chose kotlin which is developped by another company, which itself has interest to widen the language support to the maximum. As a consequence we have kotlin native and kotlin multiplatform. Apple used an 100% in-house solution but with the official long-term of having it run on the widest range of platform, and an open-source model. In reality, the language is driven toward things nobody gives a damn (swiftUI would have been almost just as good without the syntax sugar), whereas the official initial goals don't have any steam from Apple.