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I think Rust fills a slightly different niche with its safety-first principle, but Swift should eventually be a really attractive choice for anyone building cro

by TillE 11y ago

I think Rust fills a slightly different niche with its safety-first principle, but Swift should eventually be a really attractive choice for anyone building cross-platform stuff that also needs to run on iOS.

melling 11y ago
Swift has a huge advantage in that it's got a bigger community. It doesn't matter which language is the best. On StackOverFlow, for example, Swift has many more questions asked and answered. I've catalogued over 1000 blogs in the first year alone. http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html All this makes it much easier to learn Swift in a short period of time.
- honest_joe 11y ago
  That's so obvious. Swift gives you an ability to create something that can generate you $$$ very quickly. Rust on the other hand...
  - melling 11y ago
    The ecosystem is far more important than the language. Swift has a chance to rival Java in adoption.
    - thebouv 11y ago
      What? Do you realize how far Java reaches into the enterprise? And with Swift's focus still being around the walled garden of iOS/OSX development, even with the open sourcing there are many more "IFs" to achieve before Swift rivals Java in adoption. Don't get me wrong. I don't use Java and I have made apps for iOS (though not with Swift yet unfortunately). I like Swift and intend on trying it. But rivaling Java? Certainly no time soon.
      - melling 11y ago
        Yes, I've done Java in the enterprise. It's a 20 year old language and there's an estimated 9 million Java developers. Swift is only one1 but with open source and cross-platform ability (Microsoft will port to Windows), I think we have several million Swift developers with 5 years. [Update] 30 -> 20
        zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
        > It's a 30 year old language 20.
        pivo 11y ago
        As much as I like Swift, without real garbage collection I wouldn't want to use it an any enterprise project. Keeping track of ownership of reference counted objects shared between who knows how many other objects sounds like a nightmare.
        donarb 11y ago
        There's nothing to keep track of, all reference counting is handled through ARC which is built in to the compiler.
        pivo 11y ago
        I'm referring to cases where you have to use unowned, etc, to break reference cycles. The larger the application the harder it is to find these issues.
- omaranto 11y ago
  1000 blogs or blog posts? If you meant blog posts, on roughly how many blogs did they appear?
  - melling 11y ago
    1000 posts. I let people filter by site. I put all the raw data on Github as a tsv so anyone can use in Excel, etc. https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources Hopefully, I get around to putting a real search engine behind it. I currently don't crawl and index the sites.
Redoubts 11y ago
I don't think any of those languages overlap much, but they all have interesting aspects.
guelo 11y ago
Besides iOS/OSX support, what are Swift's features that make it interesting compared to other languages?
- pjmlp 11y ago
  It is a multi-paradigm programming language with great tooling and corporate backing. I can easily imagine Swift joining F# in terms of corporate adoption.
- verandaguy 11y ago
  It appeals to the functional crowd; according to Apple's textbyte [here](http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/eda6e3f7-0fda-4b46-b428-94b7ac62cdec/ http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/eda6e3f7-0fda-4b46...), Swift 2 will have support for ObjC-style generics, pattern matching, and (presumably) an updated FFI for C. I doubt it will be more attractive to functional programmers than Haskell, though; although the fact that it's an open source language that lets you do functional programming for iOS is pretty huge, IMO.
higherpurpose 11y ago
It would certainly be all sorts of ironic if (many) more Android apps were written in Swift than Go, all because Google doesn't want to replace Java with Go and make it the primary language, while Apple is doing that with Swift.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

by TillE 11y ago

melling 11y ago

Swift has a huge advantage in that it's got a bigger community. It doesn't matter which language is the best. On StackOverFlow, for example, Swift has many more questions asked and answered. I've catalogued over 1000 blogs in the first year alone. http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html All this makes it much easier to learn Swift in a short period of time.

honest_joe 11y ago
That's so obvious. Swift gives you an ability to create something that can generate you $$$ very quickly. Rust on the other hand...
- melling 11y ago
  The ecosystem is far more important than the language. Swift has a chance to rival Java in adoption.
  - thebouv 11y ago
    What? Do you realize how far Java reaches into the enterprise? And with Swift's focus still being around the walled garden of iOS/OSX development, even with the open sourcing there are many more "IFs" to achieve before Swift rivals Java in adoption. Don't get me wrong. I don't use Java and I have made apps for iOS (though not with Swift yet unfortunately). I like Swift and intend on trying it. But rivaling Java? Certainly no time soon.
    - melling 11y ago
      Yes, I've done Java in the enterprise. It's a 20 year old language and there's an estimated 9 million Java developers. Swift is only one1 but with open source and cross-platform ability (Microsoft will port to Windows), I think we have several million Swift developers with 5 years. [Update] 30 -> 20
      - zak_mc_kracken 11y ago
        > It's a 30 year old language 20.
      - pivo 11y ago
        As much as I like Swift, without real garbage collection I wouldn't want to use it an any enterprise project. Keeping track of ownership of reference counted objects shared between who knows how many other objects sounds like a nightmare.
        donarb 11y ago
        There's nothing to keep track of, all reference counting is handled through ARC which is built in to the compiler.
        pivo 11y ago
        I'm referring to cases where you have to use unowned, etc, to break reference cycles. The larger the application the harder it is to find these issues.
omaranto 11y ago
1000 blogs or blog posts? If you meant blog posts, on roughly how many blogs did they appear?
- melling 11y ago
  1000 posts. I let people filter by site. I put all the raw data on Github as a tsv so anyone can use in Excel, etc. https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources Hopefully, I get around to putting a real search engine behind it. I currently don't crawl and index the sites.

Redoubts 11y ago

I don't think any of those languages overlap much, but they all have interesting aspects.

guelo 11y ago

Besides iOS/OSX support, what are Swift's features that make it interesting compared to other languages?

pjmlp 11y ago
It is a multi-paradigm programming language with great tooling and corporate backing. I can easily imagine Swift joining F# in terms of corporate adoption.
verandaguy 11y ago
It appeals to the functional crowd; according to Apple's textbyte [here](http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/eda6e3f7-0fda-4b46-b428-94b7ac62cdec/ http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/eda6e3f7-0fda-4b46...), Swift 2 will have support for ObjC-style generics, pattern matching, and (presumably) an updated FFI for C. I doubt it will be more attractive to functional programmers than Haskell, though; although the fact that it's an open source language that lets you do functional programming for iOS is pretty huge, IMO.

higherpurpose 11y ago

It would certainly be all sorts of ironic if (many) more Android apps were written in Swift than Go, all because Google doesn't want to replace Java with Go and make it the primary language, while Apple is doing that with Swift.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]