Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

It simply sounds like there isn't much demand for Swift from the Open Source community. Apple certainly makes a big push for it internally, but outside their platform, Swift doesn't have much momentum.

If Apple wants people to use Swift like a first-class runtime, they should stop treating third-parties like second-class citizens. They have $200 billion dollars in cold, hard cash - surely some of it could go towards the selfless development of a universal future computing platform, right?

View on HN

The proprietary mobile OS vendor for which you have to use their proprietary desktop OS to build apps isn't popular in the open source crowd? Shocking, really.

How great are the IDEs over there for Swift? A quick search indicates jetbrains just shut down theirs, apple.com/swift/ really screams "this is apple stuff" and swift.org/getting-started/ seems like they use VS2019 to build on windows, but nothing about use as IDE. There is a VS Code extension with 80k installs, though.

Xcode has its flaws but mostly it's pretty great to work in. With it available for the vast majority of current Swift programmers, it's a hard market to break into.

Xcode is slow and requires a huge amount of disk space (50gb free space just to install it). Also you can check reviews in AppStore. Current rating is 3.2.

Sounds like a great market opportunity then!

1st class support for Linux is a must. It's a pain to distribute anything you write in swift (unless you can now statically-link?)

By this a mean common distros like Debian Stable must have a package for core libs, going to https://www.swift.org/download/ doesn't cut it.

The compiler has supported static linking the runtime libraries since 5.3.1, IIRC, and the package manager does so by default when targeting Linux since the acceptance of SE-0342: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...

I don't think there's a binary between "totally open, general-purpose language across all platforms" and "closed-source/proprietary". Even if Swift remains a decidedly Apple language, developers can still benefit from having access to source code and to an open discussion/planning forum. Unreal Engine takes a similar approach

I wouldn't trust Apple as far as I could kick them. Not that I think they're evil per se, just that their motivations align with their shareholders, not the dev community. Too capricious by half

And historically Apple not aligning with developers is a good thing, isn’t it?

There’s a few interesting old videos on YouTube where Steve Jobs is answering developer questions in the audience.

Apple focused on the product and the customer, while Microsoft focused on “developers developers developers.

We don’t need another Microsoft.

We need them both to be different.

No need to wave the flag for your side - I don't trust MS for exactly the same reason. MS spouting BS to developers doesn't mean they actually prioritise them.

They want lock-in. If you write something in Swift and it's not easily portable to other platforms then you might decide porting is not worth the effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com