good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though.
around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python.
it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.
the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.
I think the letdown was on the Apple side - they didn't bring in the community fast enough whether on marketing, or messaging - unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++.
Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it":
Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...
We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.
Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++.
...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a small amount of what the Swift language does actually needs to be part of the language.
I'm not a Swift user, but I can tell you from C++ experience that this logic doesn't mitigate a complex programming language.
* If you're in a team (or reading code in a third-party repo) then you need to know whatever features are used in that code, even if they're not in "your" subset of the language.
* Different codebases using different subsets of the language can feel quite different, which is annoying even if you know all the features used in them.
* Even if you're writing code entirely on your own, you still end up needing to learn about more language features than you need to for your code in order that you can make an informed decision about what goes in "your" subset.
You can take this approach in personal projects - with teams you need to decide on this and then on-board people into your use of the language. This does not work.
I _can_ do the same with Rust, doesn't mean it's "the language I reach for" for making e.g. a website. Because the tooling, ergonomics, hireability factor, etc. are still very harshly against it.
Same with Swift, but I'd call that more of a wasted opportunity because Apple, unlike Rust Foundation, has a mountain of money to make it happen, and yet they don't seem to care.
I don't know why anyone would want to use Apple tools if they are not developing for Apple platforms. Apple barely maintains compatibility for their own platforms, using Swift on a non-Apple platform is setting yourself up for doubule pain.
Re: module name selectors, wasn't this already possible, e.g. ModuleA.getValue()? Though I suppose this disambiguates if you also have a type called ModuleA.
> Swift 6.3 introduces the @c attribute, which lets you expose Swift functions and enums to C code in your project. Annotating a function or enum with @c prompts Swift to include a corresponding declaration in the generated C header that you can include in your C/C++ files
Why did this take so long to be added? Such strange priorities. Adding an entire C++ compiler for C++ interoperability before adding... C exports. Bizarre.
C++ interop got attention because it helps Apple absorb low-level codebases that already moved past pure C. Exporting Swift to plain C mostly means more DIY FFI spaghetti.
Once enums, ownership rules, and nullability cross that boundary, the generated header stops looking like a neat bridge and starts looking like one more place for ABI bugs to hide. Closures make it weirder fast, because now your error handling and calling conventions can drift just enough to produce the kind of bug that wastes a whole afernoon.
It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).
The language doesn’t really matter. The underlying SDK/framework is where the action is at.
However, I suspect that we may not be too far off, from LLMs being the true cross-platform system. You feed the same requirements, with different targets, and it generates full native apps.
Interestingly, Kotlin has a pretty solid cross-platform story.
I'd pick it over Swift if targeting Android since it can build and run in the JVM as well as natively -- and has Swift/ObjC interop. Its also very usable on the server if you wanted to, since you can use it in place of Java and tap into the very mature JVM ecosystem. If that's what you're into.
And I have a lot more faith in JetBrains being good stewards of the language rather than Apple, who have a weird collection of priorities.
Whats the stdlib situation for swift in comparison to newish languages like go or rust. I know its not batteries included lke python - and doesnt have a massive dev ecosystem of helper libs seeming to be mostly tied to macOS/iOS operating system API/ABI.
There are still challenges with basics like compression, which tends to involve trawling Github for the least dubious toy project. Even Apple's Compression framework is missing important algorithms like ZSTD.
Another problem is the Apache Software Foundation don't seem to have any Swift maintainers, which means there really aren't any good pure Swift libraries for Arrow or Parquet.
There are some really good open-source libraries from Apple like Swift Collections or Swift Binary Parsing.
around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python.
it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.
the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.
I think the letdown was on the Apple side - they didn't bring in the community fast enough whether on marketing, or messaging - unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++.
No way something that compiles as slowly as Swift dethrones Python.
Swift for TensorFlow was a cool idea in that time …
https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400
--- start quote ---
Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff... We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.
--- end quote ---
Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++.
...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a small amount of what the Swift language does actually needs to be part of the language.
* If you're in a team (or reading code in a third-party repo) then you need to know whatever features are used in that code, even if they're not in "your" subset of the language.
* Different codebases using different subsets of the language can feel quite different, which is annoying even if you know all the features used in them.
* Even if you're writing code entirely on your own, you still end up needing to learn about more language features than you need to for your code in order that you can make an informed decision about what goes in "your" subset.
It's a nice lang for sure, but this will never be true with the way things are. Such wasted opportunity by Apple.
E.g. ClearSurgery[0] is written fully in Swift, including the real-time components running on the Linux boxes.
[0] https://clearsurgery.vision
Same with Swift, but I'd call that more of a wasted opportunity because Apple, unlike Rust Foundation, has a mountain of money to make it happen, and yet they don't seem to care.
Reminds me of "In case you forgot, Swift has 217 keywords now" https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183
Why did this take so long to be added? Such strange priorities. Adding an entire C++ compiler for C++ interoperability before adding... C exports. Bizarre.
Once enums, ownership rules, and nullability cross that boundary, the generated header stops looking like a neat bridge and starts looking like one more place for ABI bugs to hide. Closures make it weirder fast, because now your error handling and calling conventions can drift just enough to produce the kind of bug that wastes a whole afernoon.
For Windows there's a 5 year old blog post: https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/
For Linux there's a guide for GNOME: https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/
It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).
Is it gonna be what you primarily use if you wanna write an Android app? Probably not.
Is it gonna displace react Native? Probably not. Is it gonna reach the levels of flutter? Maybe.
However, I suspect that we may not be too far off, from LLMs being the true cross-platform system. You feed the same requirements, with different targets, and it generates full native apps.
I'd pick it over Swift if targeting Android since it can build and run in the JVM as well as natively -- and has Swift/ObjC interop. Its also very usable on the server if you wanted to, since you can use it in place of Java and tap into the very mature JVM ecosystem. If that's what you're into.
And I have a lot more faith in JetBrains being good stewards of the language rather than Apple, who have a weird collection of priorities.
Another problem is the Apache Software Foundation don't seem to have any Swift maintainers, which means there really aren't any good pure Swift libraries for Arrow or Parquet.
There are some really good open-source libraries from Apple like Swift Collections or Swift Binary Parsing.
[0] https://swiftpackageindex.com/search?query=platform%3Alinux