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.
Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity.
Hacker News: 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.
Like, what more do you want from them? For them to only open-source Swift Build once they've fully implemented complete parity for Windows and Linux? In the years you'd be waiting for full parity, we'd still see this same kind of comment on every story about swift, asking when they're going to open source a production-level build system.
I was pretty excited to hear that Ladybird is doing a lot of stuff in Swift, because I think it's a pretty decent and fast language and I think it'd be pretty neat to see a browser written in it.
I disagree.
Source: Someone who has been programming Apple since 1986, and has heard last rites being administered to Apple, many times.
Almost every language in the world: here's the spec, the tooling, and everything you need to use, master, and expand this language. Please use it.
Apple: sorry, Mac only.
Like, I want Apple to do the bare minimum that everyone else is doing.
You know what we want from them. If Apple wants to be accepted by the Open Source community, they can't reprise the Microsoft playbook with a smug "Think Different" twist. This is basically a beat-for-beat rerun of the C#/Dotnet situation with a different font and Corinthian leather.
The internet at-large is sick and tired of tending to Apple's scraps at their obscure whims. If you are a developer that isn't already implicated to use Swift for iOS development, you'd be wasting your time doing Cupertino's work bringing up their language for them. They do not care, and only want to exploit your time and productivity like they do with the App Store. Much like C#, this is a scenario where everyone but the main benefactor will be thrown under the bus.
Impossible to argue otherwise.
Apple is welcome to head down the same road they're going if they think it's working out for Swift. Developers aren't going to magically warm to it any more than they trusted C# unless Apple makes some unprecedented change in their attitude towards Open Source. The world doesn't owe them shit.
Swift on Linux (except NixOS) is actually very good nowadays. There’s even a libadwaita library that feels a LOT like writing SwiftUI.
Feels like a lot of folks were turned off early on, found something else, and never bothered to try again (which is fair).
Some are already adopting it like Ladybird browser.
You need one only to ship apps on Apple platforms, but that's unrelated to Swift. It applies also to apps written in Objective-C, C/C++, and multi-platform language/frameworks like Dart/Flutter.
If not dominating the games on those plarforms, Unity and C# have a strong footing to say the least. Swift doesn't seem to be making very much headway on platforms where APIs are available in anything else.
Maybe that can chance. It seems like a neat language but "it's popular because apple forces you to use it" is more damning than reassuring.
I may also add that I dislike Microsoft doesn't give to the .NET ecosystem the same care for games developers as Apple does for Swift and existing OS SDKs.
As far as DirectX team is concerned, only C++ exists, and .NET team lets third party folks do the needful.
Had it not been for MonoGame, Unity would never picked C# in first place, gone were the days of Managed DirectX and XNA, when the decision came to be as Unity did their cross-platform rewrite out of OS X.
Deployment of any software (unrelated to Swift) on Apple's platforms is entirely unrelated (and even then, at least on macOS you and any other user can install, sell, buy (...) any binary as desired).
Apple forcing an API is not enough to sustain a language's popularity.
For decades C# was only relevant on Windows, outside Unity never got wide adoption among AAA studios after Unreal became free, and after their license debacle less so, Godot favors C++ and GDScript even with C# support it isn't what most folks reach for, and Microsoft keeps having an adoption (popularity) problem on UNIX culture oriented startups.
While just like Swift on Apple's ecosystem, C# is doing just fine on Microsoft culture environments.
Popularity is relative.
Swift has been working seamlessly with Linux and Visual Studio Code for years now. You might be surprised to learn this, just like this guy was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTP5c4NqA8k&t=5484s
Swift is compatible with WASM and embedded systems. It has a well-defined concurrency standard, and as a compiler, it's been tested with massive codebases worldwide.
The community is incredibly supportive (Ted Kremenek's team is super active, attending community conferences and supporting the Server Side Workgroup). They also have an open swift-evolution process that mostly works.
Xcode not being open-sourced? Not a big deal. It's an older codebase optimized for different use cases. Their approach is to break Swift down into smaller, focused components (Package Manager, LSP server, a formatter, etc.)
JetBrains didn't open-source their IDEs either, and people don't complain about it. So, it's the same story, but it's better since you don't have any historical issues like "Oracle JVM" lurking around, causing trouble for the community.
Let me help you out; replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" and it will make a lot of sense suddenly.
The Open Source community has heard all this before. We've seen Sun Microsystems "generously" publish their Java spec to the public, we've seen Microsoft "give" their community C#. In the end, it's always more trouble than it's worth to cooperate with these language stewards and someone (either the business or community) ends up getting burned. I don't think many developers look at Swift with optimism that it won't end in the same Dotnet/Mono nightmare we've seen in the past.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Apple has invested heavily in a language that, like C#, has a bunch of incredible features. Unfortunately they have yet to invest in the developer relations requisite for making such a language popular. Lord only knows that I'm not wasting my time to do Apple's work for them just to get a cross-platform app to compile with upstream LLVM and Clang. I could use any other language - nobody is going to commit to an ecosystem that treats them as a second-class citizen.