"Swift has been taken over by theorists who debate academic things or solve yet another corner case in their type system, making a complex language even more complex, rather than deliver what their users (developers) actually need to build real-world apps."

I often wonder why they didn't choose a language like C++ instead of implenting their own language again? I mean, C++ has its faults and some argue that it is too complicated but you can still do plenty writing simple C++ without going over to the complicated stuff.

"NSInternalInconsistencyException " ouch

"Swift code can still crash in a way that the caller can’t recover from, thanks to things like nil unwrap failures" Out of interest, what happens in this instance? Does a nil unwrap failure not throw an exception of some kind?

Code analysis that is part of C++ compilers catch a lot of these NULL scenarios, particularly if you use something like SAL on your code as a standard practice.

With regard to the last C++ template example, why can Swift not do this? It is possible to some extent in C# with generics but what is Swift missing?

I ask these Swift questions being a complete novice with regard to it; I've got a book I mean to get around to reading one day...

XCode is indeed rather buggy (but always has been???). It does do code analysis for C++ like identifying dead code (point 17 in the article) but I don't know about other languages.

As for Flutter, it's written in C++ but the examples all appear to be in Dart - any way of actually writing the application in C++??? Some pointers (excuse the pun) would be welcomed. (It appears impossible at the moment - you need to learn yet another language like Fart to be able to write for it...)