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Comment by boringuser1 | Hacker News Reader

>Now if only Apple would put more effort into cross-platform support for Swift...

You made the mistake of thinking Swift is a programming language and not just the Apple API.

Swift currently supports Linux and has unofficial support for Windows. It's open-source and compiles via LLVM. Commercially Apple has been unenthusiastic about fleshing out its support for non-Apple platforms, but the open-source community has partly filled that gap and there's lots of enthusiasm in the community. Given the recent decline in Apple's hardware sales, they could be heading for a Microsoft-like rebirth into a company that's forced to play nicer with others.

https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-as-a-cross-platform-languag...

There is almost zero application for Swift outside of an Apple environment. I'm willing to bet there is precisely zero production code written in Swift for Windows (or Linux).

Anyhow, the Windows API (.net, C#) is better and has a brighter future and present.

I know multiple teams who have Swift in production on Linux servers

Alright, well, don't do that.

Why not?

Why not? Dive in, the water’s great.

https://vapor.codes

ballsy slogan they got there

yeah their marketing isn't great

Like I said, Windows support is currently middling. I would bet there's some Linux production code in Swift, though not much. But both of these are cultural problems, not technical ones. If Apple said tomorrow, "we're going to go all-in on making Swift a universal programming language", thousands of developers would cheer and jump on-board. The main thing holding it back right now is lack of confidence in its support; people don't want to invest in a new cross-platform codebase that might have its legs cut out from under it in a couple of years.

Swift is much closer to the metal than .NET, and it has very innovative syntax features. It's more analogous to Rust than to C#. .NET is a strong cross-platform ecosystem, but it's silly to say "we don't need any others because this one's good enough". It's not even the strongest one that currently exists - probably the JVM is. It honestly just sounds like you're hating on Apple for the sake of it.

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