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I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured aud

I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."

st3fan 2y ago
I don't know about Xcode, but Swift is open source with an active community so if it doesn't work for you then you can definitely bother the Swift Open-Source project with a pull request or a proposal for a language or tooling improvement. You can also have a discussion on the forums or in the bug tracker with fellow contributors. You can also make the change in your own fork and use that. This is exactly how for example the Rust or Python open source projects work. And like those projects you can look at the Swift proposals and code to see _numerous_ cases where people did bother to bother the team with change requests or directly contributed to those improvements. It is all open source. Check it out.
- dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago
  Scooby doo meme <Open source contributor> “let’s see who you really are”. <pulls off mask>. Apple employee.
  - bastardoperator 2y ago
    All 1100+ contributors are Apple employees?…
    - truncate 2y ago
      Are 1100+ contributors active contributors and/or actually making non-trivial changes?
  - vips7L 2y ago
    Does it matter? Most commits to OpenJdk are Oracle employees and most committees to C# or typescript are Microsoft employees.
threeseed 2y ago
a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift. b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.
- kennywinker 2y ago
  > All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies. I think you might have this backwards. What you say used to be true back in the days of phonegap, where the hardware was abstracted far away, but all of the frameworks you mention provide pretty easy paths to access new APIs and hardware features. But companies that are drawn to cross-platform tooling already want a uniform experience across devices - and that's why you get the lowest common denominator being used with tools like react native.
virgil_disgr4ce 2y ago
> anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.
- hu3 2y ago
  Xcode as an example of quality? It's atrocious from my experience. Updates tied to OS and crashes more than it should.

st3fan 2y ago

I don't know about Xcode, but Swift is open source with an active community so if it doesn't work for you then you can definitely bother the Swift Open-Source project with a pull request or a proposal for a language or tooling improvement. You can also have a discussion on the forums or in the bug tracker with fellow contributors. You can also make the change in your own fork and use that. This is exactly how for example the Rust or Python open source projects work. And like those projects you can look at the Swift proposals and code to see _numerous_ cases where people did bother to bother the team with change requests or directly contributed to those improvements. It is all open source. Check it out.

dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago
Scooby doo meme <Open source contributor> “let’s see who you really are”. <pulls off mask>. Apple employee.
- bastardoperator 2y ago
  All 1100+ contributors are Apple employees?…
  - truncate 2y ago
    Are 1100+ contributors active contributors and/or actually making non-trivial changes?
- vips7L 2y ago
  Does it matter? Most commits to OpenJdk are Oracle employees and most committees to C# or typescript are Microsoft employees.

threeseed 2y ago

a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift. b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.

kennywinker 2y ago
> All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies. I think you might have this backwards. What you say used to be true back in the days of phonegap, where the hardware was abstracted far away, but all of the frameworks you mention provide pretty easy paths to access new APIs and hardware features. But companies that are drawn to cross-platform tooling already want a uniform experience across devices - and that's why you get the lowest common denominator being used with tools like react native.

virgil_disgr4ce 2y ago

> anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.

hu3 2y ago
Xcode as an example of quality? It's atrocious from my experience. Updates tied to OS and crashes more than it should.