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Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

Swift developers are not that many. It's less than 5% of respondents to the Stack Overflow developer survey [1].

Microsoft and Google each have languages/ecosystems with larger developer share (Google at over 6% for Dart, and Microsoft at over 27% for C#).

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#technology-most-popula...

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Kotlin is at 9% and Java developers, at 30% here, could easily switch over.

It's not a zero-sum game, they don't have to reduce support for other languages. It would be a completely new source of developers for these platforms. Better 1% than 0%, and I would say that effort for that would not outweigh the possible benefits and income from new devs/apps.

It's not Microsoft and Google's job to write Apple's software for them. It's like complaining that Apple doesn't write a good Dotnet runtime; of course they don't. It's not their job, and they don't want to anyways.

> It would be a completely new source of developers for these platforms.

I have no idea who you're referring to here. Who are the developers that are locked-in to iOS/MacOS but would consider ChromeOS or Windows if it supported Swift better? I cannot think of a single person I know that fills that bill. If anything it's the other way around, where people end up switching away because they don't have any use for Swift/AppleScript.

less than 5% vs. over 6% is not that big of a difference

Is that survey actually scientific? I have been doing Ruby and Swift for years and never completed that survey. That survey is of reasonably active users to Stack Overflow — there is a selection bias. There isn’t a lot of great Swift content on SO, so that’s going to attract fewer developers to answer the survey.

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