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Redesigned Swift.org is now live
- AndriyKunitsyn 1y agoCool. If only some of this effort went into improving Swift Package Manager.
- fckgw 1y agoYes I'm sure the people responsible for the website front end will get right on that.
- 90s_dev 1y agoI noticed that Go's and TypeScript's websites are massively more complicated than they were 10-15 years ago, much harder to find basically anything without google, which Swift's feels close to. But Lua's site remains as easy to use as ever.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoto your point, i've often suspected Python caught on because of the clarity of its documentation.
- fidotron 1y agoThe book about Lua (Programming in Lua) is a masterpiece, and one of the essential programming books. If I could write that well in my first language I could probably triple my income. To do it in a second one is just incredible.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoI’m definitely going to get that then. Thanks for the tip
- tonyedgecombe 1y agohttps://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html
- 90s_dev 1y agoSlightly off topic, but the sheer size of the ToC of the Mixing Swift and C++ page[1] makes me think I'm better off just learning and using C++. https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/ https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
- thought_alarm 1y agoIf that kind of complexity frightens you then you probably want to stay away from C++ entirely.
- 90s_dev 1y agoWhat I mean is, if I'm going to learn complexity, I might as well go all-in on one unified language.
- duskwuff 1y agoQuite frankly, this isn't even that large. There are entire books about topics like JNI (Java <-> C) or Swig (Python <-> C); this page is fairly short given the broad scope of Swift's C++ integration.
- lillecarl 1y agoI've got no experience, but I imagine you don't have to interface with C++ too often, and when you do it's probably unlikely someone haven't written a wrapper library already. That's how the entire Python ecosystem works, either someone has made a wrapper, you make a wrapper or you use subprocess if the library has a CLI and you're not in a performance sensitive part of execution. Any language that makes programming easier is good. Modern C++ is also quite good, but I feel like there are more "nice to haves" in other languages. Reflection is one, for serializing things without boilerplate and his uncle. And just reflecting on types in general can be nice.
- pier25 1y agoAnyone using Swift for web backend? I looked into Vapor but it seems much slower than it should be for a compiled language.
- open592 1y agoThe speed is less correlated with the language it’s implemented in, and more with the amount of man hours spent building and optimizing it. Vapor is a very small project, and thus is slower then other larger more mature projects.
- desertmonad 1y agoI've used vapor as a side project API. For anything new and only on Apple ecosystem, its simpler to just go with SwiftData and CloudKit though.
- miffy900 1y agoI tried seeing how it ranks on the 2025 tech empower benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2ornh-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v... And up against C#, Go and C++, Vapor could not make the top 70. Even just compare Swift vs PHP and its a really poor showing for vapor: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2qi2n-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v...
- pier25 1y agoIt gets worse results than Laravel which is something.
- belmont_sup 1y agoProbably a bad benchmark. I see that a recent blog post on the swift site discusses a migration of a large service from Java to swift using vapor.
- zffr 1y agohttps://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-password-monitoring-service-from-java/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...
- mdhb 1y agoI just can’t ever see Apple not treating developers like shit and it makes me want to have nothing to do with Swift.
- microsoftedging 1y agoEh. Google are the exact same. Pick your poison.
- mdhb 1y agoThey actually are not. Take a look at say the two most popular languages to come out of Google being Go and Dart… none of those communities ever really feel hard done by, the tooling is great, the documentation is amazing, it runs everywhere, it’s fast, it’s easy to work with, has excellent cross language interop and they are just generally well supported. I think you’re just going on vibes here but it’s kind of bullshit when you think about it for more than a moment.
- ARandomerDude 1y agoAlso the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly different. Android is much more pleasant to work with. Android Studio exists but you don’t need to use it, unlike XCode. I’m very happy writing Android apps using vim and adb.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI develop for both platforms and don’t agree at all. The Android dev experience has a lot of potential to be good, but it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard, both of which regularly cause more pain for me than their iOS counterparts (Swift Package Manager and clang’s code stripper). It’s also only been relatively recently that Google has decided it’s ok to be opinionated and provide happy paths for devs to follow in their UI library with Compose. Android Framework was/is notorious for having 5 ways to accomplish any given task and none being “right” or the only one capable of doing what you need being deprecated. And then there’s Kotlin, which is so close to being a great language but dies on weird hills ideologically (e.g. please just give me “if let” syntax, “.let {}” is ugly and automatic unwrapping fails just enough to not be useful). Freedom of editor is nice but doesn’t make up for the rest, at least for me.
- ChocolateGod 1y agoSwift seems like a really nice language that's held back by it's association with Apple. Seems to hit a sweet spot of a fast/compiled (compared to Javascript), memory safe (compared to C++), object orientated (compared to Go) and easy to write (compared to Rust). Doesn't seem like there's any maintained bindings for Qt though, although there are some interesting ones for GTK (e.g. https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift)
- sedatk 1y agoSwift also doesn't have a mark&sweep GC, and uses reference counting, which makes its memory footprint much smaller than GC-based runtimes.
- 90s_dev 1y agoIt also means it's easy to create reference cycles that never get deallocated. Especially in callback anonymous functions.
- tbojanin 1y agoThe tooling around finding these references cycles (Instruments) is 2nd to none imo.
- Onavo 1y agoThe issues it has around circular data structures is almost, though not quite, as bad as rust.
- steeleduncan 1y agoTrue, but it only works on Apple systems, which makes Swift far less appealing on non-Apple systems. This adds weight to the point the GP comment makes about Swift being held back by its association with Apple
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- ChrisArchitect 1y agoOfficial post: https://www.swift.org/blog/redesigned-swift-org-is-now-live/ https://www.swift.org/blog/redesigned-swift-org-is-now-live/
- SwiftyBug 1y agoI would love to try Swift for things other than iOS if it had nice development tools. I don't ask for much. A decent LSP and code formatter are all I want. I refuse to use Xcode, so being able to code Swift in my code editor of preference would be great.
- OliverM 1y agoIt has both of those. I use them from Emacs comfortably.
- reaperducer 1y agoI'm not a Swiftie, but there's this if you're already on a Mac: https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/pixelfoundry/pixelfoundry.Swift/ https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/pixelfoundry/pixelfo...
- chipotle_coyote 1y agoI think if you were already on a Mac and wanted to use Panic Nova, you'd be better off using Icaras: https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/panic/panic.Icarus/ https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/panic/panic.Icarus/ The one you linked to looks like it's just syntax highlighting; Icarus has that, but also has LSP, building, and debugging support.
- timsneath 1y agoGood news! https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/swift https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/swift
- runjake 1y agoConcur. This is a pretty good setup. Caveat: I'm using Swift for command-line software.
- belmont_sup 1y agoWhat about a formatter? I recall having to figure out which library to install as binary just to do formatting. What do you do?
- Kon-Peki 1y agoWell since this is about the web site redesign, I’ll leave my opinions on the language to myself and just say that I like the color gradients and how the trail of color coming off of the mascot bird acts as a separator as you scroll down the page. It’s a fresh change from your typical modern website.
- fidotron 1y agoThe inclusion of "Embedded" on the front page when all the documents say it's experimental and not supported in public releases "yet" does make me curious if they will announce more at WWDC. The big hopes for me this year of WWDC would be a Swift port of the Foundation DB record layer, from Java, along with a decent http server package. It's underappreciated just how useful it is in golang having a production capable http server in the standard library.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI know a lot of people don’t like extensive stdlibs, but I’m not among them. As long as the stuff in the standard library is actually decent, I’m all for including more. The fewer dependencies I need, the better. It’s one of the reasons why I’m still a big fan of developing for Apple platforms despite the recent drama: it’s a very batteries-included experience, which means it’s not just feasible but pleasant to develop top-class apps with a dependency list that can be counted on one hand. That’s amazing for not just the dev process itself but also for long term maintenance.
- tiffanyh 1y ago> Apple's Secure Enclave processors run software written in Embedded Swift, as was announced at WWDC last year. Apple shipped 225 million iPhones (just iPhones) in 2024, so that's a very large deployment by any industry's standards. https://forums.swift.org/t/redesigned-swift-org-is-now-live/80296/9 https://forums.swift.org/t/redesigned-swift-org-is-now-live/...
- ohdeargodno 1y agoReleased on a single architecture, hand in hand with the builders of them architectures that happen to also be the builders of Swift. Working on a dozen architectures with only 10 000 units sold each would be a better proof of it being a valid option for embedded development, but I guess the industry standards are whatever we make up today.
- jiehong 1y agoI find the golang http server very basic, though. Like no content negotiation based on http headers by default, or any CORS by default. Also maybe writing headed after body does nothing since writing the body sends the response and it’s too late by then. It does work, but I don’t find it ready for production without a lot of conf and extensions first.
- pedalpete 1y agoI find it interesting the call out windows apps specifically, but not mac apps, and from what I understand, the new tools for compiling to Android are getting quite good. The last few days, I've been wondering if our commitment to building our mobile app in Swift was a mistake as the only member of our team that wrote swift is no longer with us. Has anyone got experience with Android apps written in Swift? Thoughts?
- bodge5000 1y agoI can't speak much for Android, Windows or just generally non-MacOS apps written in Swift, but it looks like they're trying avoid a Dart situation, which from what I've heard is quite a nice language but at this point lives and dies by Flutter. Intellij are doing a similar thing with Kotlin (and with great success too)
- wsc981 1y agoSome companies these days write majority of platform independent code in Kotlin and just a thin UI layer for iOS in Swift. So perhaps that is a smarter approach. I can't tell from experience myself but talked with people who do this and they're happy with this way of working.
- ashvardanian 1y ago> Swift is the only language that scales from embedded devices and kernels to apps and cloud infrastructure. Most people would disagree with this line…
- Klonoar 1y agoI think the site is good overall, but I also found this particular language to be annoying. It feels more like Apple(-esque) marketing than anything.
- thiht 1y agoThat also doesn't seem to match reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in this case I just don't see the evidence. Which is not surprising since it's a lie, at least for the "only language" part (the fact that Swift actually scales in this way is up to debate imo)
- soapdog 1y agoThere are at least to issues on github about it right now. I filled one of them.
- deverman 1y agoThis language did stick out to me even though I prefer Swift over Rust.
- Jotace 1y ago[dead]
- solarkraft 1y agoI hope the website’s focus on non-Apple platforms coincides with an actual project focus on them. I find Swift fascinating, but the software I want to write is not software locked into Apple platforms. The low level stuff looks particularly interesting, as the common low level languages all have their peculiarities.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoExample code after 2 Page Down hits. So they beat Rust on this metric!
- eviks 1y agoNot a good design, where is the search bar? Why is the site's footer area so vertically large? And why do you need two birds at the top limiting you to just a single sentence? Also the first page examples are undocumented
- gt0 1y agoReally hard to imagine a use case for Swift outside of Apple platforms. It's a good language without much library support anywhere other than Apple platforms.
- Someone 1y agoThe site being discussed prominently mentions - “Tools for Linux, macOS, and Windows” - “Run performant services on Linux and deploy to the cloud” - “Develop efficient, reliable firmware for devices like microcontrollers” - “Reuse existing C/C++ drivers and SDKs with zero wrappers or runtime glue, integrating in minutes.” The site has examples for running Swift code on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, an ESP32 microcontroller and a PlayDate. That doesn’t mean Swift is the best tool for doing these things, but “really hard to imagine a use case for Swift outside of Apple platforms”?
- npalli 1y agoAre the compile times still terrible (worse than templated C++).
- pjmlp 1y agoActually the new site looks quite cool.
- sparky4pro 1y agoSwift is usable (on Apple operating systems) if you use the add ons that Apple provides (like SwiftUI). Other than that… forget about it. Tried to use Swift for CLI apps (on macOS) and it failed miserably. The reason: after reaching a certain code size the Swift compiler is reporting vague syntax errors without line numbers. Unacceptable in 2025.
- hyperjeff 1y agoI can’t speak to the errors you’re seeing, only that my experience is different. I’ve written well over a hundred CLI apps on macOS, of all sizes. I consider it a very good language for it too (also for scripting). A nice thing is that you can leverage the whole of AppKit/Foundation/Carbon/etc in CLI apps allowing for uniquely powerful tooling & integration.
- sparky4pro 1y agoI’m happy for you and everyone else who has had the same experience as you. I’ve saved my Swift CLI apps, so I might try it again when a new version comes out, hopefully they fixed such behavior.