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Comment by mikkelam | Hacker News Reader

I would love to go and use swift at my work (working in robotics). But swift just doesn't feel mature enough for barely anything outside of iOS/macOS. I had a great time using it for that purpose. The community outside of that ecosystem is barely there.

I've picked rust instead, it feels like the exact opposite of the single large actor supporting swift, instead it's a huge community effort with lots of use cases already being seen in many spaces. AND rust just got AVR support which I suppose swift could get pretty quickly with llvm as well

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“rust just got AVR support which I suppose swift could get pretty quickly with llvm as well”

In theory, yes, but in practice I don’t see Swift going there comfortably. Its more dynamic runtime (compared to C or rust) needs more metadata, eating memory, which is precious on AVR (384 kilobytes, max, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_microcontrollers)

Just like you don't do ANSI C there, so a similar constrained version might be possible, not much different from Pascal.

https://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal-avr

Yeah, back when we first started using it there was a lot of interest in using it to create back-ends as well, but there just wasn't a lot of support for it. For one, it needed to be developed and compiled on a not-Mac environment to be viable, and that has just never been much of a thing. Might be better now, it does just use LLVM in the back-end and IntelliJ has a good editor for it, but still.

I think C# had that problem for a long time, but Microsoft did a great job / made a great strategic decision with .NET Core I think.

Still Mono, Xamarin and Unity preceded that decision.

True, but even now the C# library ecosystem is lacking compared to e.g. JVM/JavaScript/Python ecosystems. And that's definitely because it was historically closed source and mostly (but not entirely) single-platform.

I dont agree with "C# library ecosystem is lacking". The nuget ecosystem is massive, and the paid offerings side is much larger (owing to more of an enterprise audience generally). There arent a lot of well known projects that _run_ on the CLR like there are on the JVM, but the in-language ecosystem is just as robust as those other ecosystems if not more so.

> the paid offerings side is much larger

The fact that a lot of the offerings are paid is a massive negative to me. I don't know of any other language ecosystem that is like this.

.NET CLR + BCL was originally released as BSD code, Rotor project, but no one cared about it.

.NET was also available in other platforms where Microsoft saw commercial value, via partner agreements.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2006_04/article4.pdf

https://www.sidiary.org/press-Diabetes_Symbian-968.asp

I saw posts on r/rust talking about making a rust-like language for non system programming. I think Swift fits exactly that purpose, only frustrated by Apple giving it Windows support a decade after it's creation.

> only frustrated by Apple giving it Windows support a decade after it's creation.

Swift was only publicly announced six years ago.

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