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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be the same effect as people getting Macbooks because... they have an Apple logo on them.

Technically, either Rust, Python, or Go is superior to Swift in every usecase it has. It doesn't fill a niche, its just Apple would rather reinvent the book than use an alternative on iOS, and they wanted clean compatibility with their other NIH language Obj-C. Its a nice compromise language for applications, but it is currently an app language without a framework outside Apple operating systems.

Besides that ecosystem compatibility its just worse than the alternatives besides the whole Apple is behind it so everyone is developing in it because they dream of working at / for / with Apple for some reason. Are Mozilla, Google, and and Guido just not sexy enough anymore?

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Since I expect nothing less than clear, well-informed commentary from Hacker News regulars, I would be very interested in learning exactly what technical aspects make Rust, Python, and Go superior to Swift in each use case, as well as lessons that future PL designers might draw from the Swift team's missteps.

> Technically, either Rust, Python, or Go is superior to Swift in every usecase it has.

How so, exactly? The only one on that list I'd say maybe to is Rust.

Swift as a language may not be superior to go in itself ( quite the opposite imho), but the fact that go chose a specific type of concurrent programming and built their language around it makes it more straightforward.

With swift, designers chose not to choose. Which means you'll resort to using libraries ( basic threads with gcd or C libraries such as libmill, or libuv), which means future incompatibilities between codebases that chose different models.

No. GCD is not 'basic threads', GCD is a concurrency model based on executing blocks (closures) on queues. Threads are abstracted away by GCD. NSOperationQueue abstracts even further to provide a higher level concurrency model. Or you can go down the stack to NSThread to actually get your 'basic threads'.

The programmer gets to choose the level of abstraction appropriate to the task in hand.

let's say gcd is still much lower level than channels+select or asyncio+single run loop or actors+shared nothing.

At the minimum, i would say it's much more flexible but also much less opinionated.

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