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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 scen
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI’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