If Foundation was genuinely cross platform and open source, that description becomes more plausible for at least some subset of engineers. * (for non-Apple devs, Foundation ~= Apple's stdlib, things like dateformatting)
I don't mean to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious what it looks like through someone else's eyes and the only way to start that conversation is taking an opposing position.
I am familiar with an argument it's better than Rust, but I'd very curious to understand if "better than" is "easier to pick up" or "better at the things people use Rust for": i.e. I bet it is easier to read & write, but AFAIK it's missing a whole lot of what I'll call "necessary footguns for performance" that Rust offers.
* IIRC there is a open source Foundation intended for Linux? but sort of just thrown at the community to build.
Theres a library for just about everything in Python. I dont know that I can say that about Swift.
* I'm too old now, 36, and you have no idea how much I roll my eyes internally at hopeful invocations of 'man if only Swift was cross platform / look apple did this so swift is coming cross platform. All the "SwiftUI web is clearly coming" wish casting from big names in the Apple dev community who should have known better broke me.
** the mish mash of bad, competing solutions to bringing iOS UI cross Apple platforms forfeits the core premise of an Apple-values inheriting dev: I'm infinitely better off having a base UI engine that renders the same stuff on each platform than a shim that renders and acts differently
Dart might not break world records for most innovative or performant general purpose language, but it’s a completely different language from 6 years ago.
This seems to be a (bad) pattern with Apple, one that Google used to (and still does) get a lot of flack for, this habit of not investing in things and then thing dying slow, painful deaths.
E.g. I remember this criticism being leveraged at e.g. Safari a lot.
But, for better or worse, Apple is not a technology company, really, its a design company. They focus on their cash-cow (iPhone) and main dev tools (macbook) and nearly everything else is irrelevant. Even their arm-laptops aren't really about being a great silicon competitor, I suspect. Their aim is to simplify their development model across phone/laptop/tablet and design seamless things, not make technically great or good things.
The reason(s) they haven't turned (as much) to enshittification probably are that a) it goes against their general design principles b) they have enough to do improve what they have and so release new stuff c) they aren't in a dominant/monopolistic market position where they can suddenly create utter trash and get away with it because there's nothing else.
And yes, they exhibit monopolistic behaviors within their "walled garden", but if they make a product bad enough, people can and will flee for e.g. Android (or possibly even something microsoft-ish). They can't afford to make a terrible product, but they can afford to abandon anything that doesn't directly benefit their bottom line.
Which is why I suppose I generally stopped caring about most things Apple.