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Comment by mahkoh | Hacker News Reader

>Isn't it good that now there is an alternative to C?

Rust has had endorsed language bindings for GTK for a long time: https://www.gtk.org/docs/language-bindings/rust

Some official Gnome applications are written in Rust.

Swift only supports a small number of linux systems (Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux) which makes unsuitable for general linux application development.

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Swift run on almost every linux desktop (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu etc. have even their own packages) I hate when people are writing false information with such a confidence.

See https://www.swift.org/platform-support/ for a list of supported distributions.

You seem to have hallucinated that I said that swift cannot be made to run on other systems. You can even make windows-only games run on linux so that is not a surprise.

What distinguishes swift from gcc, clang, python, bash, go, rust, and so on is that languages other that swift aim to support linux in general.

Swift only supports a small number of linux systems. which is at most half-truth cause this is just official installers and most likely you'll use some sort of rustup (rust wasn't working on every system few years ago if you use official installer not some sort of rustenv installer or building from source etc.) you can use https://github.com/kylef/swiftenv you can use community packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swift etc.

"and so on is that languages other that swift aim to support linux in general." -> again not true linux distro dosen't change swift usage it is just official build is run for few most popular distros and you can use prebuild swift-bin on any linux repo. (arch, debina, ubuntu, centos etc. etc.) You can say the same stuff about rust/nim/go every other language that didn't have official release for some niche linux distro.

I don't think that, say, rust, offers any explicit support for any particular linux distro?

Swift here are basically saying they'll endeavour to make sure it works on those particular distros, but in general you're probably going to install Swift on Linux the same way you install rust; via your distro's package manager, and supported by your distro, not the Swift or Rust project.

It might run but support and packaging is missing, compared to gtk oficially supported for other languages and packaged on distributions that matter (e.g. Debian).

https://forums.swift.org/t/new-swift-package-repository-for-...

"runs" would be different than "supports". AFAIK, there still isn't an official package for Swift in the Arch package registry, so to say Swift is supported by Arch sounds like "writing false information with such a confidence".

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swift

> Install swift-bin [AUR]

Notice the [AUR] tag, that means it's in the Arch User Repository, not in the official repository.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Official_repositories

Slightly ironic given the whole "confidence" side-note you made earlier...

almost no smaller/newer language is added to official repo so i don't know what are you taking about it is kinda expected? (even if this languages are fully supported on linux)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MATLAB https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Scala etc.

Be that as it may, the initial claim was "Swift only supports a small number of linux systems" which you tried to refute but moved the goal post from "supports" to "runs". One of them are true for Swift + Arch, yes.

Supporting languages isn't the arch maintainers job I srsly don't understand your argument if all language stuff (LSP, language, debbuger etc.) work on every linux distro without any modifications is this distro "supported"?

If rustup will be removed from official repo we can argue that rust isn't supported in arch?

Why doesn't Swift run on other Linux distributions?

It runs just fine comment above is lying if you can run llvm/clang you can run Swift.

I don't know if I would say, 'just fine.' Technically yes. The issue comes in with that not everything in Foundation is quiet yet there on the Linux platform. But it is getting better and better and probably good enough for 90% of stuff. It seems more of a problem of just getting the last bit done to push Foundation over the finish line.

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