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612 points dayanruben | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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uhura ◴[] 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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JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B ◴[] No.42901558[source]
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.

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pmarreck ◴[] No.42905718[source]
Python is not compiled, it is interpreted, and it has many warts.

Kotlin depends on the JVM and is also not compiled.

Rust? Now you're talking. Except that it has warts, too.

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1. zoot64 ◴[] No.42906587{3}[source]
Kotlin is compiled in the sense that it compiles down to bytecode read by the JVM. It's not machine code level but it is still compiled to a certain degree. And Kotlin can compile natively for multiple targets including macOS and iOS without need for the JVM. There's also WASM support too.
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2. pmarreck ◴[] No.42913578[source]
Did not know about non-JVM compilation. Does it include the JVM as part of the binary then? Links?