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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

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.

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.