I mean, you can use all of POSIX with C FFI if you wanted. But that goes for most languages, and it's a far cry from the convenience of a well-made standard lib

I mean, you can use all of POSIX with C FFI if you wanted. But that goes for most languages, and it's a far cry from the convenience of a well-made standard library. People want Apple to stop pretending like it's impossible to support other OSes, it's really that simple. If they want their language to have serious popularity, they have to act like a real Open Source maintainer and not a business. Swift's adoption outside of Apple developers forced into using it is more or less sabotaged by Apple's decisions. Whether they realize it or not, this behavior is undermining Swift's credibility and likely pushing people onto C++/Rust where they can use LLVM without limitations.