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Definitely! There's only one enormous issue with this outlook: the rest of the world is bigger. Much bigger. Exactly how much bigger depends on who you ask, but

by jchw 4y ago

Definitely! There's only one enormous issue with this outlook: the rest of the world is bigger. Much bigger. Exactly how much bigger depends on who you ask, but it's a lot bigger. Just on the consumer side... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share Maybe it doesn't matter because developers prefer macOS, so the rest can be treated as a secondary case? Not even close. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t... What about servers? Network services and SaaS are a huge industry, of course. Admittedly, I can't even find a good source for what marketshare macOS has: most "server marketshare" counts seem to exclude it or just merge it in with "UNIX-likes". The number appears to be extremely small. There's definitely some exceptions; I think Imgix has been deploying Macs to the datacenter. However, in order to do so, they essentially had to build custom rack mount equipment for desktop machines... I think it's very safe to say that macOS deployments for services are extremely in the minority, and the majority of macOS data center deployments aren't even for general network services specifically but mainly just for CI. OTOH, macOS Server and any "server" SKUs of Macs have been discontinued as far as I know. "Rust isn't a competitor to Swift" is not the zinger in Apple's favor that you think it to be. In fact, Apple would be best to support making Rust work better on Apple platforms if it can't support making Swift work better on other platforms in a much more significant way than it has in the past few years. And this all makes sense. Apple developers had been extolling the virtues of Objective C for a long time, including how it is superior to C++. I'm not even arguing for or against that PoV, but Objective C had at least pretty good compiler support on platforms outside of macOS and it did nothing for its adoption. The main place you'd see Objective C on other platforms were in software originally written for macOS, like `unar` on Linux. That's mainly it... Unless you want Swift to fail in the long term, I think this PoV is a very badly losing position.

lll-o-lll 4y ago
Your argument seems to contradict itself. On the one hand you say “objective c failed because it was available on multiple platforms, but no one cared” but you also infer “Apple is failing because it hasn’t made Swift available on multiple platforms”. Is it possible that it just doesn’t matter (for Apple) whether Swift is Apple ecosystem only? It makes me sad, because I really like Swift. Not enough to become an Apple dev though.
- jchw 4y ago
  I'm saying Objective C was further along in some regards and it still wasn't enough; the investment that Apple would need to make to make Swift popular across platforms is very non-trivial, and just simply nowhere near where they're at today. That's basically it. They're doing some things with Swift that they never did for Objective C, like making a cross-platform version of Foundation. That helps... but it's not good to start out behind on other aspects. I'm sure they invested tons into devrel on macOS and that family of operating systems. It's weird to think that they could get away with doing less on other platforms where they're already on a much more competitive and less favorable landscape and still have it work out. Maybe accounting-wise, it's difficult to justify putting all of this effort into something that will ultimately make it easier to leave your ecosystem. That's fair enough but that makes Swift's cross-platform strategy broken. Ultimately, they're competing with programming languages that have the level of support they do not, but as far as I can tell they're treating it as more of a tool for developers who are primarily Apple-oriented but wish to deploy software across platforms.
  - lll-o-lll 4y ago
    What you are saying makes a good deal of sense. It’s a shame though, as Swift seems a really great language with an interesting value proposition. If it were properly cross platform, you could see it being a real competitor to Rust in luring away C++ devs as opposed to traditional GC (deterministic destruction! Can do RAII! Better handling of real-time constraints! Easy learning curve!). Ahh well.

by jchw 4y ago

lll-o-lll 4y ago

Your argument seems to contradict itself. On the one hand you say “objective c failed because it was available on multiple platforms, but no one cared” but you also infer “Apple is failing because it hasn’t made Swift available on multiple platforms”. Is it possible that it just doesn’t matter (for Apple) whether Swift is Apple ecosystem only? It makes me sad, because I really like Swift. Not enough to become an Apple dev though.

jchw 4y ago
I'm saying Objective C was further along in some regards and it still wasn't enough; the investment that Apple would need to make to make Swift popular across platforms is very non-trivial, and just simply nowhere near where they're at today. That's basically it. They're doing some things with Swift that they never did for Objective C, like making a cross-platform version of Foundation. That helps... but it's not good to start out behind on other aspects. I'm sure they invested tons into devrel on macOS and that family of operating systems. It's weird to think that they could get away with doing less on other platforms where they're already on a much more competitive and less favorable landscape and still have it work out. Maybe accounting-wise, it's difficult to justify putting all of this effort into something that will ultimately make it easier to leave your ecosystem. That's fair enough but that makes Swift's cross-platform strategy broken. Ultimately, they're competing with programming languages that have the level of support they do not, but as far as I can tell they're treating it as more of a tool for developers who are primarily Apple-oriented but wish to deploy software across platforms.
- lll-o-lll 4y ago
  What you are saying makes a good deal of sense. It’s a shame though, as Swift seems a really great language with an interesting value proposition. If it were properly cross platform, you could see it being a real competitor to Rust in luring away C++ devs as opposed to traditional GC (deterministic destruction! Can do RAII! Better handling of real-time constraints! Easy learning curve!). Ahh well.