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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

(www.swift.org)
612 points dayanruben | 1 comments | 01 Feb 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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uhura ◴[01 Feb 25 19:07 UTC] No.42901158[source]▶
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.

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kelnos ◴[01 Feb 25 21:02 UTC] No.42902281[source]▶
This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.

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aryonoco ◴[01 Feb 25 22:37 UTC] No.42903167[source]▶
I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps).

Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE.

C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong type safety, etc. All the things you need to build out the logic of business applications. And it's fully open source.

I have looked at Swift. By comparison, the tooling is 10 years behind and the performance is not even close. I struggle to see what Swift brings to the table over C#.

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1. WuxiFingerHold ◴[02 Feb 25 04:33 UTC] No.42905851{3}[source]▶
I used C# on .NET framework (the old .NET running only on Windows) 10 years ago at work. Then I had to use it 2 years ago again, and man, did it change! ASP.NET Minimal API is absolutely awesome, as the Generic Host integrating config, logging and DI is a great too. A very mature and complete framework.

It brings everything to the table a great modern language and ecosystem needs. Even null safety.

Regarding error handling, I don't have a strong opinion yet. I think Rust has nailed it, but C# (with unchecked exceptions) didn't create any issues in the projects I worked on.