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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Yeah and it leaves out a lot of details to be desired.

For example, no debian build of Swift. And when I ported the ubuntu version to .deb, I ran into odd bugs, like when you kill it, it lives on! Apparently a known issue.

Basic _big_ bugs that shows Apple's half assed commitment to open-source on any other platform than their own. I can't blame them, but Swift on linux, beware.

Swift is a wonderful language, sadly I'm not seeing the commitment from Apple to make it ubiquitous. Also to note, Apple has basically killed macOS as a server, rendering Swift more towards a system/UI target language; which is a shame, because again, it's a wonderful, safe, language.

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I find it kind of surprising that they don't put more effort behind swift-on-linux, it would make learning swift a generally more valuable skill. This increases the pool of people who would be willing to write mac software, and in particular, standalone libraries

I don't find it at all surprising that Apple is not putting any effort into Linux and is instead pooling their developer efforts behind other things. Hopefully things like SwiftUI, a framework that has existed for around five years and still feels a bit immature.

Yes, SwiftUI, Swift Concurrency and to an extent SPM have been quite frustrating. SwiftUI on macOS in particluar is a major step backwards from AppKit as it is right now.

Foundation is going through a gradual open-source rewrite by Apple and the Swift community, which is going to take a while but will eventually open up Swift more to other platforms.

By the time the Swift project eventually has a great message to share on that, there could well be hardly any non-iOS/macOS developers listening. Look at the last 5-10 years. The momentum gap between e.g. Rust and Swift in the wider development community is gargantuan.

IMO if Swift had had a great multiplatform toolchain/developer-experience in the ~2015-2019 timeframe then it could have established itself as the no-brainer C++ successor. But that moment has passed and they squandered the opportunity.

It still has an opportunity to be so, but only in the context of Apple's kingdom.

If nothing else, because the King says what tools are allowed.

Yeah I have high hopes for the new Foundation. The current open source Foundation is OK but it doesn't quite match what's there on Apple platforms and makes it all a bit difficult. Having one shared implementation should improve things.

It's still funny how this is positively encouraged by HN and yet .NET receives constant stream of FUD and criticism for already being what Swift wishes to be in some 5 to 10 years in terms of being platform agnostic (both the runtime and the tools).

There's a project for using Swift to write GNOME applications, which is fascinating to me: https://github.com/AparokshaUI/adwaita-swift

I wish them success but realistically they won't have success.

Yeah I get that it's frustrating. But it is open source, and there isn't anything stopping you or anyone else from making contributions that bring the language to more places. Sure, various aspects of the project could be improved but that doesn't mean it is "half assed".

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