Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

They painted themselves in a corner. Apple being the best computing platform while trying to please everyone can never be a serious proposition. Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS, or we have to be so careful that any alternative is more interesting that what they propose.

This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.

Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Python/Kotlin/Rust/etc.

"Best" obviously means different things to different people, but at least by market share, macOS has never been the best. Modern Apple doesn't seem to care about market share outside of the iPhone (and even then, they are still more interested in the iPhone being a premium product than winning on market share).

I used to like macOS, 15-20 years ago, but now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy. That's not the way to be "best", by any metric I can think of.

Sure, macOS has continued to secure more and more elements of the OS. They have taken a different approach than Windows and Linux, which both keep large swaths of the OS woefully insecure from third-party apps for legacy reasons. But for each and every new lock, there is a key. An incredibly secure OS that gives you the power to control what third-party apps access on your computer is the best power-user feature.

Hm, I've been using macOS (alongside others) for the past 20 years straight. In what ways is it hostile and buggy?

Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety by default.

The creator of Clang and LLVM also created Swift, and interoperability with C was an explicit design goal.

So Swift offers the memory safety and data race safety of Rust, in a compiled language, without giving up tight integration with C.

(To be fair, better C integration is something the Rust community is looking to add.)

This is a rather small userbase when it comes to enterprise.

Especially because Swift will never be as versatile as Python or as efficient as Rust.

And then there's also Go, C# and Kotlin with much better tooling.

> They don't have an easy way to run untrusted software in a containerized way (compare Fedora toolbox).

The App Store is the way to run untrusted apps in a containerized way.

Kotlin’s syntax is also weird/quirky in some ways.

Typically not a great idea to be against humans, especially the ones that give you money.

That's the same dynamic as web devs writing React Native apps: you won't expect them to contribute extensions that manipulate local apfs metadata for instance.

So while it's nice to have them use the tools, you still need people who primarily care for non Apple platform and embrance swift for their purpose to have it expand.

When Apple secured the OS from third party, they also purposefully closed the door on deeper third party integration to privilege their ecosystem.

macOS only being half as useful for Android users makes it harder to be the "best" for that swath of users. iPadOS being the only tablet form in the ecosystem will also distance other users etc. They just can't please everyone while locking them in a limited ecosystem.

I'm curious to learn what you mean by this! :)

Me not liking something, does not make it bad. It’s just not my choice. I’m glad it existed, because it probably prompted Apple to do better with Xcode. Lots of people that I respect, used it.

These days, Xcode is Big Bug Ranch. When “Delete the DerivedData folder” is S. O. P. for developers, and Apple tweaked Xcode to reduce its impact on the project, you know that they have waved a white flag to bugs.

Last time I checked, their market cap was North of $3T, so someone is giving them money…

Kotlin depends on the JVM and is also not compiled.

Rust? Now you're talking. Except that it has warts, too.