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What's stopping you from using it on Linux, or your platform of choice? It seems to be supported well enough, and Vapor is a decent toolkit for building a weba

by myko 4y ago

What's stopping you from using it on Linux, or your platform of choice? It seems to be supported well enough, and Vapor is a decent toolkit for building a webapp with it.

techdragon 4y ago
Speaking as someone with similar feelings… “Well enough” and “decent” are not how I would describe something I’m thinking of investing significant mental time and effort learning and familiarisation building on. I’ve done the basic tutorials and generally like the language ergonomics, it’s not bad, and I kinda like it for the little bit of Apple platform dev I’ve done with it. But it’s basically a different language on any non Apple platform.
brundolf 4y ago
My understanding is that it's got second-class Linux support, for now. What happens when Apple loses interest? What about Windows? I don't get a sense of commitment from them outside of their own platforms, and that doesn't make me want to commit to learning or starting major projects in the language (outside of their platforms). If I can't have faith my project's foundation will continue to be solid, then I don't want to build it there; if I know I'll never have an employer who wants to let me use Swift (again, outside of Apple apps) then I don't really want to invest the time to deeply learn it (unless I'm going all-in on Apple apps) I could do a toy project or an iOS app with it, and maybe I will some day, but it's hard for me to feel like it's worth going past that while this is the feeling I'm getting from Apple (And I'm not really even blaming/judging them here; it makes total sense they would want to have a modern in-house language that's perfectly integrated with their systems and now their chipsets, and lets them ship more effectively. They don't owe anyone more than that. It's just a shame, for me personally, to think about what else could have been)
- hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
  Foundation (Swift's stdlib so to speak) is being rewritten as OSS [0] which will unify it between Linux and macOS. Right now, they use a different implementation on each platform [0]: https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/ https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/
  - brundolf 4y ago
    And that's well and good, it's clear there are some engineers at Apple who would really like to see Swift become something more than just The Apple Language, but at the end of the day they aren't the ones getting to set the priorities. And my (very subjective/anecdotal/external) impression is that the business is just sort of humoring them - maybe Linux support helps a little with internal CI or something - without actually prioritizing multi-platform Swift. If a company with Apple's resources cared about multi-platform Swift, at the business level, we would've seen sterling support yesterday. For comparison, look at what Microsoft's done with .NET since they started to prioritize multi-platform support.

by myko 4y ago

What's stopping you from using it on Linux, or your platform of choice? It seems to be supported well enough, and Vapor is a decent toolkit for building a webapp with it.

techdragon 4y ago

Speaking as someone with similar feelings… “Well enough” and “decent” are not how I would describe something I’m thinking of investing significant mental time and effort learning and familiarisation building on. I’ve done the basic tutorials and generally like the language ergonomics, it’s not bad, and I kinda like it for the little bit of Apple platform dev I’ve done with it. But it’s basically a different language on any non Apple platform.

brundolf 4y ago

My understanding is that it's got second-class Linux support, for now. What happens when Apple loses interest? What about Windows? I don't get a sense of commitment from them outside of their own platforms, and that doesn't make me want to commit to learning or starting major projects in the language (outside of their platforms). If I can't have faith my project's foundation will continue to be solid, then I don't want to build it there; if I know I'll never have an employer who wants to let me use Swift (again, outside of Apple apps) then I don't really want to invest the time to deeply learn it (unless I'm going all-in on Apple apps) I could do a toy project or an iOS app with it, and maybe I will some day, but it's hard for me to feel like it's worth going past that while this is the feeling I'm getting from Apple (And I'm not really even blaming/judging them here; it makes total sense they would want to have a modern in-house language that's perfectly integrated with their systems and now their chipsets, and lets them ship more effectively. They don't owe anyone more than that. It's just a shame, for me personally, to think about what else could have been)

hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
Foundation (Swift's stdlib so to speak) is being rewritten as OSS [0] which will unify it between Linux and macOS. Right now, they use a different implementation on each platform [0]: https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/ https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/
- brundolf 4y ago
  And that's well and good, it's clear there are some engineers at Apple who would really like to see Swift become something more than just The Apple Language, but at the end of the day they aren't the ones getting to set the priorities. And my (very subjective/anecdotal/external) impression is that the business is just sort of humoring them - maybe Linux support helps a little with internal CI or something - without actually prioritizing multi-platform Swift. If a company with Apple's resources cared about multi-platform Swift, at the business level, we would've seen sterling support yesterday. For comparison, look at what Microsoft's done with .NET since they started to prioritize multi-platform support.