Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope

Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the gap will only grow over time when compared to other languages.

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety?

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.

Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.

So you haven't heard of Kotlin Multiplatform.