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Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

I have heard great things about Swift but haven't spent a second looking into it because I assumed it's an Apple exclusive language - making it unsuitable for my use case of services deployed on Linux, developed from any OS.

To what extent, if any, is Swift exclusive to Apple devices?

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It's Apple-exclusive in the same way that C# is Windows-exclusive or Go is Linux-exclusive.

You'll have a much better time programming C# on Windows or Swift on macOS, because that's where all the best tooling is. The tools and libraries are open-source, cross-platform, and mostly maintained by one company.

That's really not the case with C# or Go. C# has first class Linux support nowadays (minus GUI support) and using Go on windows is quite easy (I daily drive go on windows at work).

With Maui, you can now have first class Linux gui support, same with Blazor. You can also even do some of the more cutting edge stuff on linux like compiling straight to ASM.

Are you sure Maui provides native Linux GUI support? (Not through a WebView)

.NET MAUI doesn't have first class Linux GUI support. Unless you count Android as Linux. [1]

There were some unofficial efforts for Linux GUI support for MAUI's predecessor (Xamarin Forms), but never first party support.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/supported-plat...

MAUI is not working on Linux, still Microsoft market it as "cross-platform" which is super misleading at best (and pure lie at worst).

Wow, you're right. I stand corrected. I've been leveraging it for Windows and Macos, and incorrectly assumed it would work on Linux as well. And when I did target linux it was using the Blazor(Webview stuff). Thanks for the correction, such a weird decision for Microsoft to market it as cross platform so heavily and omit Linux. I would definitely put it on Lie tier. Even more strange since some other features have first class linux support like compiling to native code, but others like Blazor apparently omit only linux.

No Maui doesn't support Linux desktop and Microsoft engineers have specifically acknowledged this and so far there are no plan to support Linux desktop.

https://github.com/dotnet/maui/discussions/339

Not having GUI support is definitly not first class.

Secondly many libraries are missing as a large portion of the ecosystem is still focused on Windows, and VSCode is a tiny portion of Visual Studio features.

One needs to buy a Java based IDE (Rider) for good support doing C# development on Linux.

Swift is backed by LLVM and Linux solid is pretty solid. The cross platform problem has always been the core libraries. Fortunately a pure Swift core foundation rewrite is underway. https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

Looks like I may eventually give Swift a try once the rewrite is done! I've been watching Swift for a while now but I don't have a Mac so I haven't had a reason to try it.

Do you happen to have any idea about UI library support? Will UI still be Apple only?

As far as I know all of the UI stuff is dependant on iOS and macOS specific libraries. Apples UIKit and AppKit libraries are still proprietary here (and even have completely different capabilities depending on your platform and OS version).

I see no reason for Apple to ever make the UI stuff available on other platforms, I can’t see how that would benefit them.

But there’s nothing stopping other UI libraries from making Swift bindings.

Apple surely must run a lot of linux machines internally, I imagine it would be nice for them to have internal services written in swift

That’s my understanding of why it’s on Linux (besides the community).

Apple uses tons of Linux servers, cloud and DC. Swift means they can write high performance networking stuff with memory safety and modern features in a language/library they already use internally instead of using yet another new language (or losing safety with C/C++/Obj-C).

Makes a lot of sense to me.

Most of the Linux machines inside Apple are tucked away in data centers, they're not sitting on engineers' desks (there's always exceptions). The people writing stuff that will run on Linux are usually writing in languages that are already cross platform. The stuff running on Linux inside Apple has a pretty good chance of being Java or Python (or Ruby for some teams). These languages are usually chosen for their ecosystem.

There's not much of a Swift ecosystem except the proprietary one on macOS and iOS. Without all the frameworks available on macOS there's not a huge Swift ecosystem to leverage.

Tokamak[0] is really promising on this front

[0] https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

It's not out of the question for someone to write a (e.g) GTK-backed SwiftUI API library.

I think that Apple control where the language goes. That mean that things will serve other use cases only accidentally.

fast.ai was very interested in Swift but dropped that project for that reason.

I wish fast.ai would have succeeded with Swift. The world desperately needs the ML community to move on from Python and towards a fast, statically typed language with truly concurrent multi threading.

Having a common stack that is fast and coherent from the highest to the lowest level would be wonderful.

But it seems it’s what make Python successful: it force a interface between the low level serious stuff and the configuration/use at higher level.

I'd say that it isn't particularly useful, outside of the Apple ecosystem, but I do know that there has been Linux, and even Windows, support.

In my case, I don't really care, as I program Apple native.

I think it's an excellent language. I enjoy writing in it. I write Swift, every day.

Conversely, I don't really care about swift because it isn't particularly useful outside of the apple ecosystem.

Exactly. I wasn't trying to be dismissive. It's just the way things are.

Some people loathe everything Apple. They Just. Hate. Apple.

I've been dealing with that for over thirty years. Some people hate me, for no reason, other than I write code for Apple devices.

I don't hate anyone else, but I've tried programming a number of systems, and haven't enjoyed it as much, as I do, working with Apple's stuff.

At one point IBM attempted to make swift viable on the sever-side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808619

Kitura is no longer maintained but one of its primary competitors is still going strong: https://vapor.codes/

It’s open source under the Apache license. It has support for Windows, Linux, and Android too.

Not exclusive to Apple devices at all.

More details about platform support: https://www.swift.org/platform-support/ (tl;dr Apple platforms, Linux, Windows)

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