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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

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Kotlin, Scala, and Go are garbage collected. Zig is a language that barely even has name recognition outside a certain niche that loves it.

Swift vs Rust is a real question. Currently Rust is almost always the answer outside of the Apple ecosystem, but that may change. It's a great language that could use some better tools.

Better cross-platform would be nice but it will succeed regardless given resources and level of commitment from Apple.

Does Swift really compete with those languages?

As I understand, it's pretty much just there so that people can write software for MacOS/iOS without needing to use Objective C.

It absolutely competes if the non-Apple ecosystem is improved. And Apple has put some support into running Swift in Linux, just not enough.

A big thing Swift has over all these languages is that it's higher-level than Rust and Zig, but not garbage-collected unlike Scala, Kotlin, and Go. Personally, I would use it if it wasn't for its dependence on Apple and that I use IntelliJ and they are discontinuing AppCode.

Reference counting is a garbage collection strategy, otherwise python too would be non-gc language (cpython).

ARC is very limited in swift (mostly classes) most of the other types are value types that doesn't use ARC, also most folks don't consider ARC to be GC as there is no garbage to be collected.

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