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.
That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.
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.
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.