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Comment by mlevental | Hacker News Reader

i really really really like swift. it's by far the best language i've ever used but i wish it weren't so "monoculture" (ios dev). i guess this is good for that but i really wish the open source port of foundation were the focus of the community.

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I feel like the open source port of Foundation is in pretty good shape (especially compared to a few years ago). The really important classes are mostly complete ([0]); all that's left is primarily some of the advanced networking features (but many real-world networking applications use swift-nio instead anyway). I think what's most important is 1) language refinements via swift-evolution, and 2) projects which bring Swift to more domains, such as this for the client-side and Vapor for the server-side.

[0]: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/mast...

The number of Linux issues on bugs.swift.org is still significant. Even when code compiles on Linux, it often doesn't work without crashing, or has different behavior. As someone who has tried to port (non-GUI) Swift code from Mac to Linux, I'd say there's still a ways to go.

It's not always perfect, but it's certainly much more stable than it was a few years ago, and it continues to improve with each release. A few years ago I had to spend weeks with each new Swift release debugging segfaults and working around Foundation bugs and missing features, but lately my Mac-tested code usually works just fine on Linux (except for the occasional problem with C library dependencies or platform-specific APIs).

Compile times and binary sizes are still issues although. There is a lot more optimization work left to do. It's a C++ v2 for a lot of the decisions they have made. And it doesn't scale that well when you have large code bases compared to other languages.

Something like a javascript / flutter style hot reload really accelerates your dev cycle and I wish Swift had it too.

I maintain a non-trivial Swift app and while compile times are indeed longer than those of Objective-C, it’s nothing insurmountable and has improved a lot on the past couple of years. To me it’s more than worth the trade with all I gain with Swift compared to Obj-C.

Hot reload is nice but to me is far from a dealbreaker, especially after your app is past the phase where you’re writing a bunch of new UI.

I completely agree. I currently use Rust for all my cross platform use-cases. I'd love to have the same kind of library ecosystem ("crates") with Swift that I get with Rust. I hope we will get there slowly, with this and now that Windows almost works.

i use rust too and some of the quality of life features from swift would make rust as good as swift, if not better. ?? rather than unwrap_or, as? and try?, if let, guard let. maybe there are reasons rust didn't incorporate this sugar having to do with the borrow checker i don't know but jeez i feel so burdened with boiler plate when i deal with optionals in rust.

Rust has if let. It can't chain them yet, but the proposal to fix it (RFC 2497) was accepted and implementation is in progress.

But Rust lacks `guard let x = a else { return }` which is one of the nicest additions of Swift. I know there were attempts to add it to Rust, but somehow the community really doesn't like it because a `let x = match a { Some(a) => a, None => return; }` is too similar. However I feel that guard also expresses the intent.

I frequently define a `guard!` macro in Rust that does exactly that. Seems clean enough to solve at the macro level -- doesn't necessarily need to be built into the language itself.

This kind of stuff should be on the stdlib if it's meant to be idiomatic.

Rust errs on the side of not putting things in the stdlib. Even things like random number generation or regexes are not in stdlib.

The excellent package manager (Cargo) makes this a non-issue.

As a contrary view, I find the boilerplate helps when I revisit a Rust project months later.

If you'd like a lower friction yet similar speed / systems language. I'd highly recommend playing around with Nim. It is exceedingly pleasant and easy to use.

sure but honestly how much traction does it have?

Certainly not as much as Swift, but enough to make joining our community[1] fun :)

1 - https://nim-lang.org/community.html

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