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Comment by jocaal | Hacker News Reader

It scares me how many people don't realize this. A language is only as good as the things it allows you to build. Swift can be a great language from a PLT perspective, but it is pretty much only good at making apple UI's. Anything else and you are making some important compromises you might not be aware of.

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There are lots of other things Swift is good at.

What important compromises are being made that aren't "libraries may not exist", which is true of any of the equally niche languages that get a lot more love because they aren't associated with Apple? Even the severely limited ecosystem is mitigated by the language having excellent C and decent-enough C++ interop.

That theory works well in vacum, not when there are languages with similar features and mature ecosystems to chose from.

Microsoft is discovering how hard it is to take .NET outside Windows, the fierce competition of UNIX first programming language ecosystems, and Apple is not doing with Swift half as much as Microsoft is trying to.

Microsoft has a lot of baggage they’re dragging around, though.

Getting started on C# and Windows App SDK sucks a lot for example, because everything you google about them returns boatloads of results for myriad incarnations of C#, .NET, and XAML-based UI frameworks which makes figuring it all out somewhat painful.

Compared to that, Swift offers a CLI compiler, half working debugging and VSCode experience, and zero libraries.

I bet very few of these work on Linux, https://swiftpackageindex.com/

That’s certainly a valid weakness, but at least getting up and running on Swift’s most native platforms is straightforward. One wouldn’t expect C# and Windows App SDK on Windows to be as much of a struggle as it is.

The two are completely separate. Getting C# to build and run only needs executing 'winget install dotnet-sdk-8' on windows or 'sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-8.0' on e.g. Ubuntu.

I don't get why you're so down on WinAppSDK, something that is largely ignored by .NET developers, and is really only used by Windows team or those poor souls that still believe WinRT has a future.

ASP.NET, EF, Avalonia, Uno, Akka.NET, Silk.NET, Unity, Godot and tons of other software packages work just fine on macOS and Linux, with JetBrains Rider and VSCode/C# Dev Kit/Ionide.

I like to develop in platforms’ “preferred” frameworks when possible and am not really interested in solutions trying to be a “silver bullet”. In the case of Windows I find the design language of Win11 actually pretty nice and would like to have that, which involves using WinUI/App SDK. There are alternatives such as writing an app with some other framework using a third party theme, but that can instantly become outdated with a system update or comes with weirdness like how some of the older Windows C#/XAML stuff gets all stuttery on displays running a refresh rates over 60hz.

That has nothing to do with cross platform .NET, and as mentioned only Redmond cares about it, and not everyone, Office team doesn't want anything to do with it, rather shipping Web tech on Windows.

And despite all of this, Swift is a toy on Linux compared with .NET ecosystem on Linux.

The sentiment I was responding to was that Swift is only good for making Apple UIs, which is patently false.

Again, newer languages having less of an ecosystem than older languages is not news or somehow unique to Apple (or Microsoft by that matter). The existence of more mature languages than whichever one you're considering is not news - if it was, then nobody would start any project in anything other than like three languages. And as I mentioned there is a gigantic ecosystem that Swift and several others have access to by design, which for some reason people refuse to acknowledge whenever they shut down newer languages with "but no ecosystem".

> Microsoft is discovering how hard it is to take .NET outside Windows

Ten years ago you would have had a point. However it's 2024 and .NET is solid, stable, and widely deployed on Linux et al - and that's without taking projects like Unity into account. That's far from only working well in a vacuum.

As someone that does polyglot development across Windows and UNIX like systems, I am pretty well aware how well .NET adoption is going on UNIX shops.

It doesn't matter how solid and stable it happens to be, those widely deployed on Linux workloads are mostly from Microsoft enterprise shops cutting down on server costs, not startups filled with macOS, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux desktops deciding that C# would be a great language to use on their startup.

Unity is a special snowflake, they have their own .NET infrastructure, which is also a reason why you can't just use .NET vlatest on Unity.

Going back to Swift, so far it hasn't shown to be any different than open source Objective-C, and Objective-C at least has GNUStep outside NeXT/Apple.

The reasons they don't pick it is because they are just as illiterate as their microsoft shop counterparts.

I have colleagues who worked in a "macOS + Rider and Linux Hosts" style teams for a long time, and had great experience, but when they talk about this to a wider audience they get a similar treatment to what another commenter described when dealing with an architect from Walmart. People only ever listen to what confirms their beliefs and at best ignore when being exposed to something different, or sometimes react in an outright hostile manner.

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