I'm surprised that they aren't making a bigger effort for Linux support.
Last time I tried swift on linux it wasn't even packaged by ubuntu.
If you `apt install swift` you get some object store tool.
If you `apt install swift` you get some object store tool.
This needs to be solved on Swift side. Rust had the same problem, and until it was fixed, Rust wasn't packaged by Linux distributions either. (I know this because I helped ensuring Rust's ability to compile against system LLVM.)
Swift works great on Linux. You can install it manually, or use the official docker image. I prefer using docker and have had a great experience (both developing and deploying).
Objective-C also has been available on Linux for about 25 years now, and it has hardly mattered.
Because they need it?
Apple discontinued macOS server, i bet they use Linux in some of their servers
All their networking related libs are available and tested for Linux [1, 2, 3]
Let's not forget that they package Swift for Linux, and now also for Windows [4]
Swift is a cross-platform language (you not wanting to understand it doesn't change this fact), it's not a macOS framework
[1] - https://github.com/apple/swift-nio
[2] - https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/blob/main/.github/wo...
[3] - https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/search?q=l...
[4] - https://forums.swift.org/t/announcing-swift-5-6-2-for-linux-...
Most of the work on Linux and Windows isn't made by Apple employees.
History tells us that it is not a good idea ;)
And your statement is not true at all, look at the commit history
Heck even C was fully owned by a company until UNIX V6 happened.
.net would have been dead without the community driven mono effort
C "was", it would have been dead if it was still
Notice the pattern?
No one in the .NET world cared about mono, and if they hadn't be bought from Microsoft, they would already be doing something else, it isn't as if Xamarin and Unity were making them rich.
C only got adopted, because companies got into commercial UNIX workstations and it came with them, on the base install. Until Sun introduced the concept of UNIX user and developer editions, no one cared GCC existed.
Notice the pattern?
Did the community or external contributors implement generics into the language or did they wait for years for the core developers at Google to do it?
Was WASM support a community driven effort from design to implementation or was it the core developers that did all the work?
It appears that 99.99% of the work and proposals have been implemented by the core developer team at Google.