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.

> Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS

"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.

> but now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy.

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.

Mac OS does some amazing things for security. An immutable root OS, sandboxing, very user friendly disk encryption. But there are certainly decisions that hold back the platform. Their business decisions have driven most developers away from the App Store. There is a notarization process, but it imposes a burden that many small open source projects can not bear. They don't have an easy way to run untrusted software in a containerized way (compare Fedora toolbox). Installing things globally via homebrew or a random install script is still the way to go.

> Their business decisions have driven most developers away from the App Store.

> 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.