What happened to Swift ? I used to hear so much about it -- now not so much. Maybe I'm in my echo chamber ?
Swift is doing great.
I would hardly say perfect, but it's regular headaches.
The new async model looks like a bit of a bear, but that’s why there’s a toggle for it that works on a per-module level so you can incrementally adopt it whenever you see fit.
Honestly I’ve had more pain out of the Kotlin/Android experience in the past several years. If Swift suddenly became a tier 1 language option there I’d switch right away.
Apple themselves, the only framework that they started from scratch in recent years was Metal, and even there only die hards use Objective-C instead of the Swift bindings.
Could be better, it isn't as bad as you make it to be, for a language whose design goals are to replace C, C++ and Objective-C for Apple.
If they had put the effort into Objective-C++ that they put into Swift, I struggle to imagine it in a worse place than Swift is in these days.
From language features and community culture point of view.
Who knows what present day Objective-C++ could have been if it had been the workhorse language of choice. Maybe this profiles thing Bjarne is pushing could have been in the roadmap. We will never know.
Additionally Objective-C++ never was seen anything beyond interop with existing C++ code, and only old timers like myself have its documentation, you will hardly find anything about it on Apple's documentation nowadays.