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I’m not sure that any language meets these criteria yet, but I’m placing my bets on Swift. There’s been a lot of activity in Swift’s various cross-platform work

I’m not sure that any language meets these criteria yet, but I’m placing my bets on Swift. There’s been a lot of activity in Swift’s various cross-platform working groups recently… whether or not that pans out remains to be seen, but within the community there’s absolutely a desire/will for Swift’s cross platform story to improve. Personally speaking, if Swift’s Windows/Linux support improved and a cross platform UI framework were built for it, I’d have a hard time imagining using anything else for cross platform desktop development. Swift gets a lot right for that use case and strikes a good balance between ergonomics and safety.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Sadly I think swift has missed the boat. Rust has eclipsed it in terms of cross platform and widely use crates. Swift was never big into the cross platform scene and now I think it's missed the boat. Furthermore swift's lack of macros means you're at apple's behest to have important changes to the language made. Rust didn't come up with serde, arguably one of Rust's "killer apps"; it's a third party package that the language merely makes possible. But in swift, such a thing would be impossible to do at compile time without explicit support from apple. This means that language can only provide functionality blessed by apple. Swift is a neat language but it's got a huge uphill battle if it wants to become widespread and I just don't see it happening when all it offers over rust is that you don't have to worry about lifetimes.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The biggest issue with Rust is its lack of mature UI frameworks. While several are being developed, they all have major shortcomings of one type or another, and if you want a more traditional "boring" retain-mode cross platform framework your options are even more limited. And as alluded to in my post, Rust isn't particularly pleasant to use for a UI use case anyway. Of course there is no cross-platform UI framework for Swift either, but if such a thing were to come into existence I think it'd quickly come to enjoy decent popularity for desktop application development.
- adamwk 4y ago
  I’m with the GP that there’s still a chance for Swift on other platforms. The server-side workgroup seems to be stabling SwiftNIO; so it’s at least being worked on. I don’t really agree that macros make or break a language though. And swift’s codable generation was a community driven proposal; like all language evolutions have been

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago

Sadly I think swift has missed the boat. Rust has eclipsed it in terms of cross platform and widely use crates. Swift was never big into the cross platform scene and now I think it's missed the boat. Furthermore swift's lack of macros means you're at apple's behest to have important changes to the language made. Rust didn't come up with serde, arguably one of Rust's "killer apps"; it's a third party package that the language merely makes possible. But in swift, such a thing would be impossible to do at compile time without explicit support from apple. This means that language can only provide functionality blessed by apple. Swift is a neat language but it's got a huge uphill battle if it wants to become widespread and I just don't see it happening when all it offers over rust is that you don't have to worry about lifetimes.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
The biggest issue with Rust is its lack of mature UI frameworks. While several are being developed, they all have major shortcomings of one type or another, and if you want a more traditional "boring" retain-mode cross platform framework your options are even more limited. And as alluded to in my post, Rust isn't particularly pleasant to use for a UI use case anyway. Of course there is no cross-platform UI framework for Swift either, but if such a thing were to come into existence I think it'd quickly come to enjoy decent popularity for desktop application development.
adamwk 4y ago
I’m with the GP that there’s still a chance for Swift on other platforms. The server-side workgroup seems to be stabling SwiftNIO; so it’s at least being worked on. I don’t really agree that macros make or break a language though. And swift’s codable generation was a community driven proposal; like all language evolutions have been