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On this WWDC '24 it will be 10th anniversary of Swift. Great milestone for language. There is so much work going on improving it. However From outside it does l

by geodel 2y ago

On this WWDC '24 it will be 10th anniversary of Swift. Great milestone for language. There is so much work going on improving it. However From outside it does look like it still is few years away from being general purpose outside Apple ecosystem.

pjmlp 2y ago
Yeah, consider it to be as relevant as Objective-C has ever been, even with GNUStep.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  Opinionation Incoming! Objective-C is completely irrelevant outside of Apple because Interface Builder was the killer app for Objective-C and there was never a version that worked well with anything except AppKit -- even UIKit has always been painful to use with it. iOS developers had to tolerate Objective-C, but no one else bothered. It's a shame, because Foundation.framework circa 1994 was a better standard library than any other language had at the time. Many have caught up since! Swift has many virtues outside of SwiftUI -- real static typing, functional, sophisticated generics without all the gotchas of C++ templates, complete ABI, efficient exceptions, the syntax isn't so foreign to people used to C++/Java/Rust/Ruby/Python; I could go on and on. I've written Objective-C code for 23ish years, and I like it a lot, but no one entering the workforce cares about its remaining virtues and the language has been mostly unchanged for almost two decades.
  - fao_ 2y ago
    What are it's remaining virtues? (Purely curious)
    - efnx 2y ago
      It’s the most widely used dialect of smalltalk and it compiles down to native code. Also it’s a superset of C and C++ so you can mix all three in a single file, for better or worse.
    - deergomoo 2y ago
      Not OP, but it compiles orders of magnitude quicker than Swift. It also doesn’t tend to grind Xcode to a halt as the language server tries to work out what’s going on. But, in fairness, it’s a much simpler language than Swift. Which can also be a virtue.
      - raydev 2y ago
        If you need to be nitpicky about squeezing every last bit of performance out, then Objective-C is still useful, especially given you can just drop down to C in the same source files. I've become a big "C is bad and C lovers should feel bad" guy in recent years, but I can't ignore the "simplicity" (for some experience level definiton of simplicity) and speed of the old tools.
- raydev 2y ago
  You'd consider wrong. Given iOS and macOS are exponentially more popular than when Objective-C was the primary language for both OSX/iOS, Swift is far more relevant than Objective-C ever was. Also Objective-C had comparably miniscule community effort in open source, the Swift on Server community is humming along, active, and businesses are using it on Linux. It's only grown in popularity... not sure Objective-C ever saw any amount of growth outside of Apple's platforms!
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    First of all, Objective-C was opensourced during NeXT days, that is also when GNUStep effort started. Steve Jobs famously wasn't that happy about the GCC license forcing NeXT to do so, years before Apple came into play. Secondly, yes Swift is quite relevant on Apple platforms, and that is exactly why the only ones that really care about using Swift on Linux, are mostly Apple shops writing the server side of their iDevice apps, since Apple killed OS X Server, leaving Linux distributions as the only option for server side. This on Windows is kind of nice that it exists, but I doubt it will ever take off beyond what the folks at the Arc browser are doing. The language is great, however the whole ecosystem speaks Apple Frameworks.
miffy900 2y ago
This isn't the first Swift implementation ported to Windows. RemObjects Silver has had swift on windows (as in, develop and build/run on Windows) for at least a few years now, though it's not open source. https://www.remobjects.com/elements/silver/everywhere/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/silver/everywhere/
- int_19h 2y ago
  Perhaps more importantly for many, it's not free, either. RemObjects does some very interesting stuff, but $1K for a single developer license is rather insane in the current dev tooling market.

by geodel 2y ago

pjmlp 2y ago

Yeah, consider it to be as relevant as Objective-C has ever been, even with GNUStep.

KerrAvon 2y ago
Opinionation Incoming! Objective-C is completely irrelevant outside of Apple because Interface Builder was the killer app for Objective-C and there was never a version that worked well with anything except AppKit -- even UIKit has always been painful to use with it. iOS developers had to tolerate Objective-C, but no one else bothered. It's a shame, because Foundation.framework circa 1994 was a better standard library than any other language had at the time. Many have caught up since! Swift has many virtues outside of SwiftUI -- real static typing, functional, sophisticated generics without all the gotchas of C++ templates, complete ABI, efficient exceptions, the syntax isn't so foreign to people used to C++/Java/Rust/Ruby/Python; I could go on and on. I've written Objective-C code for 23ish years, and I like it a lot, but no one entering the workforce cares about its remaining virtues and the language has been mostly unchanged for almost two decades.
- fao_ 2y ago
  What are it's remaining virtues? (Purely curious)
  - efnx 2y ago
    It’s the most widely used dialect of smalltalk and it compiles down to native code. Also it’s a superset of C and C++ so you can mix all three in a single file, for better or worse.
  - deergomoo 2y ago
    Not OP, but it compiles orders of magnitude quicker than Swift. It also doesn’t tend to grind Xcode to a halt as the language server tries to work out what’s going on. But, in fairness, it’s a much simpler language than Swift. Which can also be a virtue.
    - raydev 2y ago
      If you need to be nitpicky about squeezing every last bit of performance out, then Objective-C is still useful, especially given you can just drop down to C in the same source files. I've become a big "C is bad and C lovers should feel bad" guy in recent years, but I can't ignore the "simplicity" (for some experience level definiton of simplicity) and speed of the old tools.
raydev 2y ago
You'd consider wrong. Given iOS and macOS are exponentially more popular than when Objective-C was the primary language for both OSX/iOS, Swift is far more relevant than Objective-C ever was. Also Objective-C had comparably miniscule community effort in open source, the Swift on Server community is humming along, active, and businesses are using it on Linux. It's only grown in popularity... not sure Objective-C ever saw any amount of growth outside of Apple's platforms!
- pjmlp 2y ago
  First of all, Objective-C was opensourced during NeXT days, that is also when GNUStep effort started. Steve Jobs famously wasn't that happy about the GCC license forcing NeXT to do so, years before Apple came into play. Secondly, yes Swift is quite relevant on Apple platforms, and that is exactly why the only ones that really care about using Swift on Linux, are mostly Apple shops writing the server side of their iDevice apps, since Apple killed OS X Server, leaving Linux distributions as the only option for server side. This on Windows is kind of nice that it exists, but I doubt it will ever take off beyond what the folks at the Arc browser are doing. The language is great, however the whole ecosystem speaks Apple Frameworks.

miffy900 2y ago

This isn't the first Swift implementation ported to Windows. RemObjects Silver has had swift on windows (as in, develop and build/run on Windows) for at least a few years now, though it's not open source. https://www.remobjects.com/elements/silver/everywhere/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/silver/everywhere/

int_19h 2y ago
Perhaps more importantly for many, it's not free, either. RemObjects does some very interesting stuff, but $1K for a single developer license is rather insane in the current dev tooling market.