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Even if it's the same (faster horse?) I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they lik
by killingtime74 9mo ago
Even if it's the same (faster horse?) I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked. Yes it could continue on as a fork but it's development velocity would suffer.
- threatofrain 9mo agoIf we're going to be concerned about any language languishing due to a lack of support... like, I don't think people are going to put "Apple dropping support" as anywhere near their shortlist. Rust has a higher risk of losing support.
- kibwen 9mo agoApple was the primary and only major sponsor of Objective-C, used it as the core foundation of their entire platform, and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony. Yes, being tied so closely to Apple is an existential risk for Swift. One need only look at the quality and trajectory of MacOS to see that Apple isn't a software company, let alone a company that cares about developer experience (Xcode, anyone?). As far as modern Apple is concerned, the primary benefit of Swift is that it produces a tiny bit extra lock-in for iOS apps, by making cross-platform development more difficult.
- j3th9n 9mo agoSuch bullshit, macOS is the best OS for power users.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kibwen 9mo agoMacOS was only the best OS for power users between 1994 and 2008, at which point they shifted to x86.
- j3th9n 9mo agoAnd it still is the best OS for power users.
- bigyabai 9mo agoPower users of Subway Surfers, maybe. Modern macOS is a tragedy: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/12/is-apple-keeping-its-promises-over-online-ocsp-certificate-checks/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/12/is-apple-keeping-its-pro...
- st3fan 9mo ago"and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony" What?! This is complete nonsense. Swift was introduced 11 (!) years ago and it was clear from day one that it was going to be the future. Every single year since the introduction there were clear messages and hints in documentation and WWDC that Swift is in and Objective-C will _eventually_ be out. Little warning? Maybe if you kept your eyes closed the past 11 years. And do not forget that today you can still write apps in Objective-C.
- kibwen 9mo agoWhether or not Apple still has legacy pieces in Objective-C or still allows you to write apps in it is not the issue. The point here is that Apple shadow-dropped Swift and shifted essentially all of its development priority away from Objective-C in a matter of months.
- st3fan 9mo agoI think that is a pretty inaccurate description of what happened the past 11 years.
- kibwen 9mo agoI'm old enough to remember when Objective-C was a real and thriving (if niche) language. I remember all the buzz when automatic reference counting was the next big thing, pushed heavily by Apple and taking center stage at WWDC. And since the year Swift came out, Objective-C has joined Cobol in the category of zombie languages: the living dead with plenty of entrenced codebases but with nothing to look forward to but a continued slide into technological irrelevance.
- CharlesW 9mo agoObjective-C is as dead because of Swift as C is because of Rust, which is to say, "not very". Objective-C remains a first-class iOS development language, and there's no sign of that changing for at least another decade.
- pjmlp 9mo agoAlthough the only framework that was developed in Objective-C after Swift got introduced was Metal, anything else is mostly maintenance and incremental improvements.
- KlayLay 9mo agoPeople still write applications in Objective-C (e.g., see Transmission [1]), and the language is still maintained to support the latest OS. If anything, Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift, since you can at least use the latter outside of Apple platforms (e.g., on a server). [1]: https://github.com/transmission/transmission https://github.com/transmission/transmission
- hgs3 9mo ago> Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2]. [1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2 https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2 [2] https://www.gnustep.org/ https://www.gnustep.org/
- satvikpendem 9mo agoRust of all languages, now that it's been majorly adopted by many companies big and small, has a higher risk of losing support over a language developed exclusively by one corporation? I sincerely doubt that.
- nomel 9mo agoFirst sentence of the wiki page [1]: > Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community. As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
- heavyset_go 9mo agoIt's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol
- Aurornis 9mo agoI know Swift is technically not Apple specific, but it says right there in your quote that it was created for Apple and Apple is the giant weight behind it. I doubt Apple is in danger of dropping Swift, but if they did it would create a devastating vacuum in the Swift ecosystem.
- dochtman 9mo agoI'd bet a supermajority of Swift commits comes from Apple developers. Pretty sure the rust-lang/rust commit authors would be much less centralized.
- piyuv 9mo agoSwift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.
- vor_ 9mo ago> The community was very against function builders. Scanning the multiple review threads, that doesn't appear to be the case. According to the acceptance post, the community was overall positive about the feature but expressed concerns over the attribute naming, which was renamed in response.
- Hamuko 9mo agoA lot of Apple's software is written in Swift now. It's probably not in their interest to abandon the language.
- HaloZero 9mo agoI mean they did switch from objective c. At some point they might switch again if it makes sense.
- hokumguru 9mo agoI mean, after some almost 40 years. If 40 years from now, hell, even 20, Apple abandoned the language I’m not sure I care about the risk. And that’s not to say they don’t support objective-c still. It just hasn’t been actively developed with new features.
- cube00 9mo agoEspecially if the promise of coding agents porting between languages is even partially realised it could make it very easy for them to switch.
- rvz 9mo ago> I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked. Go's development is tied to Google Inc. and is widely used at Google. Same with Microsoft's C# with .NET and Swift isn't very different to this as long as it is open source. So this really is a moot point.
- sealeck 9mo agoGo has a critical mass that Swift clearly doesn't (i.e. there are many, many companies who have net profits of >$1bn and write most of their server software in Go). Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift (and where Google does publish public Go APIs it also tends to use them in the same way as their users do, so the interests are more aligned)...
- behnamoh 9mo ago> Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift Hmm, Apple isn't selling Swift as a product either; it's literally what they needed for their own platform, much like how GOOG needed Go for their server works.