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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Swift for Windows has not been updated for 2 years. I guess no one, especially Apple, cares about Swift becoming a general purpose language. For that reason alone, I'm skipping over it, although I hear interesting things about it.

https://swiftforwindows.github.io/

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A quick search on the Swift forums brings you an announcement that the Swift team is going to support the Windows port which is already mostly finished and will be available in Swift 5.3 [0] and above [1].

[0] https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/on-the-road-to-swift-6/32862

"Saleem Abdulrasool is the release manager for the Windows platform (@compnerd), is a prolific contributor to the Swift project and the primary instigator behind the port of Swift to Windows." Saleem's github, https://github.com/compnerd, lists swift-win32 repo, which is a "a thin wrapper over the Win32 APIs for graphics on Windows." So it's one person wrapping Win32. Not too promising yet, but it's early and there's room for Windows programmers to get involved.

Incorrect. That GitHub repository isn't the Swift port for Windows.

This is the actual port which has the CI and Installer for Swift on Windows: [0]

[0] https://github.com/compnerd/swift-build/releases

I took that text from "5-3-release-process" I'm not talking about Swift compiling on Windows, I'm talking about the GUI situation, but I'll install it and hopefully be pleasantly surprised with a full featured GUI SDK. But don't get me wrong, a supported compiler and std lib for Windows from Apple is a fantastic start.

The next release of swift (5.3) is scheduled to have Windows support (along with more Linux distros) https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/

I don't agree that Windows support affects Swift being general purpose or not.

If a Windows dev can target other platforms using Linux subsystem or containers, the only downside becomes an inability to target Windows desktops and servers, which are not hugely important targets outside of enterprise IT.

If enterprise IT is excluded I wonder what "general purpose" even means.

Enterprise IT is a user/customer category, not a purpose. And I didn't mean it to include apps. I meant that Swift is not suitable for IT depts that must use Windows servers, which is not that common anymore.

There are some very common purposes that are closely associated with enterprise IT. Writing line of business applications for Windows environments (server and/or desktop) is one of them.

But there is of course a sense in which Swift is a general purpose language as opposed to something like SQL if that's what you mean.

Unfortunately, right now Swift is not (yet) a pragmatic choice for anything other than iOS/macOS apps.

> Writing line of business applications for Windows environments (server and/or desktop) is one of them.

I disagree that this is common. Most people are on web + browser + Office these days.

Web includes a very large number of Windows Server environments, either on premises or in the cloud. You really underestimate how dominant Windows is in many enterprises.

So where are the Swift bindings for Oracle, Informix, SQL Server, DB2?

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