> Apple was willing to ship the feature but took their time and got lots of community feedback before a version of it became officially part of the language.
So let me tell you, as someone who was a very active member of the community when these features were announced, this is not what that felt like. I, like the rest of the community, found out about function builders by noticing code presented on a slide at WWDC which would not compile under the then-current version of Swift. There was then a large debate within the community, where members of the core team presented post-hoc rationalizations about how "Swift was always intended as a language which would support DSL's and declarative programming". But the message was clear - this feature was going into the language, with zero prior community review or input, because it was required for the business goals of Apple.
The thing that made this particularly jarring for many in the community is that it was so far out of character for the general language evolution process. If anything Swift had been known for being slow at adopting new features. Every addition or change had to meet a very high standard of 1. feeling cohesive with the language, 2. not limiting the future design space, and 3. not presenting risks with respect to the ABI.
Highly necessary features like variadic generics with obvious utility languished for years, cross-platform support and tooling remained in this grey zone of working in some select cases but not others, and here were radical changes to the language being made which were not known to the community at all. For me and a lot of others it clarified things about the direction and governance philosophy of the language.
> But the flip side is that you don't have a lot of parallels to draw experience from when using it - you must gain experience by working with SwiftUI itself.
What would be the big differences you would see with other hot-reloading FRP-style frameworks like React and Flutter?