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Comment by easeout | Hacker News Reader

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare minimum"?

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Core libs and foundation for starters?

https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

This, right?

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-foundation

Yeah I jumped into swift on Linux a while back having mostly used it on apple platforms and I couldn’t even tell anything was different. A few years ago I would’ve had to struggle with SwiftNIO but not nowadays. URLSession, Codable, etc. all there on Linux (not sure about Combine but Combine is stupid in the Swift 6 world IMO. Swift concurrency is better in almost every way).

Swift on Linux (except NixOS) is actually very good nowadays. There’s even a libadwaita library that feels a LOT like writing SwiftUI.

Feels like a lot of folks were turned off early on, found something else, and never bothered to try again (which is fair).

I also have a dim view of Combine and Swift's shitty observation regime, but what does its concurrency have to do with it?

Swift Concurrency as a feature set includes async/await and async for, which solve a large part of Combine's same problem with better safety and less setup/teardown. These days Combine is still useful, specifically for multiple observers and several cases of adapting to older event publishing sources.

Combine is for setting up observers to changes, whereas Concurrency is for async operations. I don't see the relationship.

Which was not open source from the start?

Foundation wasn't made to be part of the Swift project until recently. 25 years ago it was the "foundation" of Cocoa, the Mac OS X API derived from NEXTSTEP. It was an Apple platform thing explicitly—now it is remade in Swift and is part of the Swift project.

Side note, I think it was hilarious that Swift was allowed on FOSDEM. Even “free” (as in you probably don’t have to pay for a developer account to use it, *unless you want to ship some binary), Swift remains an Apple product.

You don't need an Apple developer account for Swift on server, Windows and Linux.

You need one only to ship apps on Apple platforms, but that's unrelated to Swift. It applies also to apps written in Objective-C, C/C++, and multi-platform language/frameworks like Dart/Flutter.

I think the bigger insult towards the Open Source community is their refusal to publish Free Software on the App Store.

Is swift not open source?

The Swift compiler, LLVM, Swift Standard Library, CoreDispatch, the Swift Package Manager and the Swift LLDB debugger are all FOSS and allow you to compile, debug, deploy, sell, buy and ship any binary you want under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

Deployment of any software (unrelated to Swift) on Apple's platforms is entirely unrelated (and even then, at least on macOS you and any other user can install, sell, buy (...) any binary as desired).

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