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Apple so very clearly does not give a shit about anything outside of the Apple ecosystem, it’s kind of a core part of their company DNA at this point. I can’t

by mdhb 2y ago

Apple so very clearly does not give a shit about anything outside of the Apple ecosystem, it’s kind of a core part of their company DNA at this point. I can’t ever see Swift on the server or in other contexts catching on and honestly just with the way platforms as a whole are developing I can’t see Swift surviving as a mainstream language beyond the next 5 years. Its value proposition is already on shaky grounds and is actively getting worse with time the moment you look outside Apple’s walled garden. Unless they are able to keep that lock in at the same level moving forward it’s just got very little going for it. I think something like 1/3 apps in the App Store are ALREADY written in Dart / Flutter which is probably even a nicer language from a developer experience point of view, with much much better tooling and documentation, that runs everywhere and has comparable performance.

freeone3000 2y ago
That’s honestly depressing. I used flutter because I couldn’t figure out XCode, and am continually lamenting the poor type-checking, static analysis, and mediocre performance… how is swift worse?
- mdhb 2y ago
  Darts type system and static analysis are genuinely great… I have no idea what you’re talking about. Flutter does 120fps with ease I’m also confused what you’re talking about there too
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    I was asking the flutter app to act as a bluetooth mesh hub and it started dropping packets when the (external) simulator got to 5000 devices, when the same algorithm in C++ running on a pi 2020 (which is much weaker than the A17!) managed the full 16000 theoretically possible. The profiler (which… opened in a web browser?) tracked it back to most of the time being spent in averaging and rolling encryption, it wasn’t bluetooth-locked. Developing was also frustrating, with Android Studio simply being unable to signal compilation errors, and many issues only showing up on one phone or another. The zeroconf libraries have different methods, but this could not be detected until runtime on either device. The device I wasn’t actively testing on frequently had some regression in sensors, bluetooth, or even UI. It did display an animation OK, so no fault there I suppose.
  - 3836293648 2y ago
    Flutter is fine when everything is compiled, but shader compilation is awful
scarface_74 2y ago
You realize that Google is all but abandoning Dart/Flutter and don’t even use it for most of their own cross platform apps? https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from... https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/conference https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/con...
- mdhb 2y ago
  That story never happened, I remember it well because everyone like you went insane about it but when the truth came out it ended up being that their headcount has literally changed by one person.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And the fact that Google itself doesn’t use it for any of their mainstream cross platform apps?
    - mdhb 2y ago
      Google earth just went through an entire rewrite in order to migrate to flutter. They are building an entire operating system around flutter. You’re making shit up. Take the L and move on
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        You mean the same vapor ware operating system that they have been promising for almost a decade? And Google Earth - as opposed to Google maps, Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc is not a “major app”. Flutter and Dart are going to end up in the same graveyard as many of their other products - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
        mdhb 2y ago
        You’ve posted one dumb thing after another and pretended like you’ve made a great point after each one. That’s really a special kind of moron who does that. Have a good day.
rudedogg 2y ago
> I can’t see Swift surviving as a mainstream language beyond the next 5 years. I got into macOS development when Swift was first released, and used it heavily up until 2022 or so. I think I agree with you. The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex. And I think the issues are fundamental. It sucks because I’m willing to develop for macOS exclusively, but the whole package is so rough and frustrating. Somehow they had every advantage (endless resources and complete platform control) and couldn’t put something together that’s better than Rust/Zig/whatever. Not to mention the inability to ship any useful AI developer tools, the dumb constraint of only shipping new major updates once a year at WWDC, the lack of ANY modern game development framework, etc.. I think I’ve finally talked myself into giving up on it.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  > The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex. also error messages are next to useless in many cases this really trips up new users and (speaking from experience) unless you have someone that can mentor them they're gonna give up pretty fast swift is evolving so quickly to fill gaps in capabilities but the tooling and ux of actually coding (speed, error messages, fixits etc) really needs heavy work badly imo
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  I can’t speak for Zig, but it seems like Rust is rather awkard with imperative UI frameworks, and instead is more inclined toward declarative/reactive frameworks. That’s one area where Swift is a bit more flexible, and one reason why I like it. While I like to write simpler bits of UI in something like SwiftUI (think small components, recycled cells, etc) I find that declarative UI gets increasingly cumbersome as projects gain more features and become complex, and that doesn’t change much with the language it’s written in. As such my projects tend to be imperative-dominant with declarative components and maybe simpler screens sprinkled throughout. UIKit and SwiftUI work together nicely for this. The only issue is the lack of UI frameworks for non-Apple platforms. There’s decent GTK+Adwaita bindings for Swift which is pretty solid for Linux, but to my knowledge the only thing out there for Windows at the moment are WinUI bindings written by The Browser Company for Arc, but as I understand it those are still pretty incomplete. Compile times haven’t be a problem for me, even with complex codebases. Incremental builds are fast enough and I’m not running full builds often enough for that to impact my overall evaluation of the language.
hirvi74 2y ago
Since Apple cares about their ecosystem so much, I wish they would give a bit more of a shit about Xcode. I wish they'd keep updating AppleScript more, or just completely replace it, but I do not blame Apple on that one. Swift could absolutely replace AppleScript in terms of functionality, but that wouldn't make Apple any money. So, we all know that will never happen.
- icedchai 2y ago
  I hadn't fired up Xcode in years. Yesterday, I compiled an open source app and was amazed how little the UI and UX has improved. I used to do quite a bit of Objective C mobile development up until 2012 or so.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  im the opposite, i want them to give up and switch over to open source tooling - instead of all the bespoke apple stuff - we should be able to build apps with lsp and swift package manager imo the xcode ui part can be open sourced so the community evolve/improve it better since apple has like max 3 people working on it apparently
ein0p 2y ago
I kinda wish it did actually catch on outside the Apple ecosystem. I like the language quite a bit, but since I no longer program for MacOS even peripherally, I don't get to use it. But I'm afraid it's going to need a miracle at this point, Rust and Go have a massive, insurmountable lead on non-Apple platforms. It could be argued that Swift's catching on outside macOS would be very good for Apple, by expanding the pool of developers proficient in Swift, and removing the friction towards people using their Linux code on Apple systems. But Apple is blessed with an AppStore which is not a complete dumpster fire, so they probably don't feel the need to do any of that, and feel like they'd be sinking millions into an initiative that has zero chance of success.
pjmlp 2y ago
The story of Swift on server is for Apple shops doing iDevices development, which server backends, remember Apple no longer sells OS X servers. Additionally Apple isn't Google, Swift has more chances to survive as proprietary language on Apple ecosystem, than Dart as FOSS if Google ever gets bored as usual.

by mdhb 2y ago

freeone3000 2y ago

That’s honestly depressing. I used flutter because I couldn’t figure out XCode, and am continually lamenting the poor type-checking, static analysis, and mediocre performance… how is swift worse?

mdhb 2y ago
Darts type system and static analysis are genuinely great… I have no idea what you’re talking about. Flutter does 120fps with ease I’m also confused what you’re talking about there too
- freeone3000 2y ago
  I was asking the flutter app to act as a bluetooth mesh hub and it started dropping packets when the (external) simulator got to 5000 devices, when the same algorithm in C++ running on a pi 2020 (which is much weaker than the A17!) managed the full 16000 theoretically possible. The profiler (which… opened in a web browser?) tracked it back to most of the time being spent in averaging and rolling encryption, it wasn’t bluetooth-locked. Developing was also frustrating, with Android Studio simply being unable to signal compilation errors, and many issues only showing up on one phone or another. The zeroconf libraries have different methods, but this could not be detected until runtime on either device. The device I wasn’t actively testing on frequently had some regression in sensors, bluetooth, or even UI. It did display an animation OK, so no fault there I suppose.
- 3836293648 2y ago
  Flutter is fine when everything is compiled, but shader compilation is awful

scarface_74 2y ago

You realize that Google is all but abandoning Dart/Flutter and don’t even use it for most of their own cross platform apps? https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from... https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/conference https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/con...

mdhb 2y ago
That story never happened, I remember it well because everyone like you went insane about it but when the truth came out it ended up being that their headcount has literally changed by one person.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  And the fact that Google itself doesn’t use it for any of their mainstream cross platform apps?
  - mdhb 2y ago
    Google earth just went through an entire rewrite in order to migrate to flutter. They are building an entire operating system around flutter. You’re making shit up. Take the L and move on
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      You mean the same vapor ware operating system that they have been promising for almost a decade? And Google Earth - as opposed to Google maps, Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc is not a “major app”. Flutter and Dart are going to end up in the same graveyard as many of their other products - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
      - mdhb 2y ago
        You’ve posted one dumb thing after another and pretended like you’ve made a great point after each one. That’s really a special kind of moron who does that. Have a good day.

rudedogg 2y ago

> I can’t see Swift surviving as a mainstream language beyond the next 5 years. I got into macOS development when Swift was first released, and used it heavily up until 2022 or so. I think I agree with you. The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex. And I think the issues are fundamental. It sucks because I’m willing to develop for macOS exclusively, but the whole package is so rough and frustrating. Somehow they had every advantage (endless resources and complete platform control) and couldn’t put something together that’s better than Rust/Zig/whatever. Not to mention the inability to ship any useful AI developer tools, the dumb constraint of only shipping new major updates once a year at WWDC, the lack of ANY modern game development framework, etc.. I think I’ve finally talked myself into giving up on it.

andrekandre 2y ago
> The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex. also error messages are next to useless in many cases this really trips up new users and (speaking from experience) unless you have someone that can mentor them they're gonna give up pretty fast swift is evolving so quickly to fill gaps in capabilities but the tooling and ux of actually coding (speed, error messages, fixits etc) really needs heavy work badly imo
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I can’t speak for Zig, but it seems like Rust is rather awkard with imperative UI frameworks, and instead is more inclined toward declarative/reactive frameworks. That’s one area where Swift is a bit more flexible, and one reason why I like it. While I like to write simpler bits of UI in something like SwiftUI (think small components, recycled cells, etc) I find that declarative UI gets increasingly cumbersome as projects gain more features and become complex, and that doesn’t change much with the language it’s written in. As such my projects tend to be imperative-dominant with declarative components and maybe simpler screens sprinkled throughout. UIKit and SwiftUI work together nicely for this. The only issue is the lack of UI frameworks for non-Apple platforms. There’s decent GTK+Adwaita bindings for Swift which is pretty solid for Linux, but to my knowledge the only thing out there for Windows at the moment are WinUI bindings written by The Browser Company for Arc, but as I understand it those are still pretty incomplete. Compile times haven’t be a problem for me, even with complex codebases. Incremental builds are fast enough and I’m not running full builds often enough for that to impact my overall evaluation of the language.

hirvi74 2y ago

Since Apple cares about their ecosystem so much, I wish they would give a bit more of a shit about Xcode. I wish they'd keep updating AppleScript more, or just completely replace it, but I do not blame Apple on that one. Swift could absolutely replace AppleScript in terms of functionality, but that wouldn't make Apple any money. So, we all know that will never happen.

icedchai 2y ago
I hadn't fired up Xcode in years. Yesterday, I compiled an open source app and was amazed how little the UI and UX has improved. I used to do quite a bit of Objective C mobile development up until 2012 or so.
andrekandre 2y ago
im the opposite, i want them to give up and switch over to open source tooling - instead of all the bespoke apple stuff - we should be able to build apps with lsp and swift package manager imo the xcode ui part can be open sourced so the community evolve/improve it better since apple has like max 3 people working on it apparently

ein0p 2y ago

I kinda wish it did actually catch on outside the Apple ecosystem. I like the language quite a bit, but since I no longer program for MacOS even peripherally, I don't get to use it. But I'm afraid it's going to need a miracle at this point, Rust and Go have a massive, insurmountable lead on non-Apple platforms. It could be argued that Swift's catching on outside macOS would be very good for Apple, by expanding the pool of developers proficient in Swift, and removing the friction towards people using their Linux code on Apple systems. But Apple is blessed with an AppStore which is not a complete dumpster fire, so they probably don't feel the need to do any of that, and feel like they'd be sinking millions into an initiative that has zero chance of success.

pjmlp 2y ago

The story of Swift on server is for Apple shops doing iDevices development, which server backends, remember Apple no longer sells OS X servers. Additionally Apple isn't Google, Swift has more chances to survive as proprietary language on Apple ecosystem, than Dart as FOSS if Google ever gets bored as usual.