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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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melling·

The ecosystem is far more important than the language. Swift has a chance to rival Java in adoption.

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What?

Do you realize how far Java reaches into the enterprise?

And with Swift's focus still being around the walled garden of iOS/OSX development, even with the open sourcing there are many more "IFs" to achieve before Swift rivals Java in adoption.

Don't get me wrong. I don't use Java and I have made apps for iOS (though not with Swift yet unfortunately). I like Swift and intend on trying it. But rivaling Java? Certainly no time soon.

Yes, I've done Java in the enterprise. It's a 20 year old language and there's an estimated 9 million Java developers.

Swift is only one1 but with open source and cross-platform ability (Microsoft will port to Windows), I think we have several million Swift developers with 5 years.

[Update] 30 -> 20

> It's a 30 year old language

20.

As much as I like Swift, without real garbage collection I wouldn't want to use it an any enterprise project. Keeping track of ownership of reference counted objects shared between who knows how many other objects sounds like a nightmare.

There's nothing to keep track of, all reference counting is handled through ARC which is built in to the compiler.

I'm referring to cases where you have to use unowned, etc, to break reference cycles. The larger the application the harder it is to find these issues.

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