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.

> languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety?

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.)