Ask HN: Swift is a good language, so why doesn't it get much attention? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Swift is a good language, so why doesn't it get much attention?

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I am primarily a C/C++ software engineer. And I am trying to decide which new systems programming language to learn. So I started reading about Rust and Swift. Both look very similar and nice. Swift looks bit intuitive to me though.

Anyway, it looks like Swift does not get much love from the rest of the developer community apart from developers from the Apple ecosystem. Is this because Apple is leading the development of Swift?

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It's primarily because it wasn't launched with much support for non-apple systems and it is considered hard for many in the PLT domain to get changes in for support on alternative systems. It's improved somewhat in recent times but the launch very much stifled it's usage anywhere but on Apple systems so they are a little behind.

That shouldn't necessarily stop you from exploring it though. Maybe you can help boost it outside of the Apple ecosystem.

> Maybe you can help boost it outside of the Apple ecosystem.

Me a minion :)

I don't know about the niceties or otherwise of the language. But the fact that you need to install the huge bloated whale that is Xcode [about 5GB, last time I looked], just in order to try it, means you've got to really want to dip a toe in that particular water.

It is just about 500MB[0] now with some Linux dependencies[1]

[0] https://www.swift.org/download

[1] https://www.swift.org/getting-started

Hmmm... that's odd. So you can try it on Linux for the penalty of a 500MB download --which isn't too bad. But if you want to try it on OSX, you have to download Xcode? --which is pretty off-putting.

I expect Xcode carries a big MacOS services/UI libraries overhead. The Linux version is the language plus minimal libraries.

Those are rookie numbers, Visual Studio (+ MSVC) build tools are pushing past 10GB pretty easily.

what is a “good” language?

A language that makes it more difficult to write bugs.

Because Apple is only really committed to fostering it on it's platforms. Sure, there's Swift for other platforms, but using them, it seems like only a tier 2 platform at best, in order to check some boxes ("Look! It's multiplatform!")

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