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.
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.