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Comment by yannikyeo | Hacker News Reader

The article mentioned adopting Swift for core algo would tie you into Apple eco, as Swift is not "cross-platform". Swift however is open source and cross platform, just not well supported in other platform. Wondering if adopting Flutter and Dart will end you up in the same boat? Well Flutter is cross platform, but that cross platform support is dependent on how Google wants to support it. You cant just port it into let say a new watch platform or Raspberry Pi or Huawei's HongMengOS. Maybe the best route, as in the article, is to use a really cross platform languages C, C++, Rust for product core, and then layer it with the native UI code. Anyone has any idea if this is how Adobe develop their products?

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According to Stroustrup[1], Adobe builds everything in C++. Perhaps they add some C# shim for Windows and Objective-C (or even Swift) for Mac.

A great advantage of choosing C++ as a core language is that the language (albeit syntactically/semantically a monstrosity to many) still evolves while receiving feedback from industry (i.e., features are there because complex software needs it). There's the Standard C++ Foundation [2], where big players like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia have a say.

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/applications.html

[2] https://isocpp.org/about

Plus it is available of the box across all major OS SDKs, so no need for extra tooling, or libraries, beyond what those SDKs already offer.

Adobe is also old, as software vendors go. I have no knowledge of their internal workings but it wouldn't surprise me if they still have some code in a product that predates the existence of C# or Apple's adoption of Objective C. They also have a need for algorithmic speed, and C++ has long been a prime tool for that.

> The article mentioned adopting Swift for core algo would tie you into Apple eco, as Swift is not "cross-platform". Swift however is open source and cross platform, just not well supported in other platform

They clearly state this themselves:

> while there are early attempts at running Swift on other platforms, how committed to that effort do you think will Apple be

They justify this scepticism with experience from trying to run Objective C code on other platforms:

> We’ve tried to port our core Liquid platform to Windows via WinObjC and GNUStep, but both attempts produced only partial success and a brittle platform that we’d be hesitant to build on for the future.

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