Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

We should NOT do this. Swift is not cross-platform! As nice a language as it is, Swift support for Linux and Windows seriously lags behind Mac.

If we choose to elect Swift as an ML language, we're handing keys to a certain platform vendor. I don't want to be tied down like that.

Keep using Swift for app development--it's great at that. But keep it far away from research and development.

View on HN

Swift on Linux is great! I use it for a ton of projects, both standalone as well as for microservices development. Aside from cryptographic operations (provided by CommonCrypto on the Mac) I haven't really encountered any scenarios where it can't get the job done. And, for those, I could theoretically make use of OpenSSL (if I felt like going through that exercise).

Just one data point: trying Swift + TensorFlow was as easy using Ubuntu Linux as it was for macOS.

I don’t think google has any interest in letting swift remain mac only, so in the long run i think we’re safe.

Not to mention the fact that mac doesn’t have any technology on the server, so if any code is supposed to reach production one day, it’ll have to at least run on linux.

> we're handing keys to a certain platform vendor

Swift is open source

Swift is completely supported by Linux iirc, not considering max or iOS specific UI libraries. Windows support is probably not a priority because.. why would it be?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com