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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform
This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.
Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Python/Kotlin/Rust/etc.
Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.
> Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS
"Best" obviously means different things to different people, but at least by market share, macOS has never been the best. Modern Apple doesn't seem to care about market share outside of the iPhone (and even then, they are still more interested in the iPhone being a premium product than winning on market share).
I used to like macOS, 15-20 years ago, but now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy. That's not the way to be "best", by any metric I can think of.
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.
> 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.
A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.
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#.
I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."
I don't know about Xcode, but Swift is open source with an active community so if it doesn't work for you then you can definitely bother the Swift Open-Source project with a pull request or a proposal for a language or tooling improvement. You can also have a discussion on the forums or in the bug tracker with fellow contributors.
You can also make the change in your own fork and use that.
This is exactly how for example the Rust or Python open source projects work. And like those projects you can look at the Swift proposals and code to see _numerous_ cases where people did bother to bother the team with change requests or directly contributed to those improvements.
a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift.
b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.
Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.
Whatever Apple's goal is being, the result is written on the wall: Swift's brand is strongly associated to Apple ecosystem for most programmers. They won't adopt it unless they're already targeting Apple's platforms.
See C#/.Net Core. It runs on Linux for so many years. But people still treat it as "Microsoft's thing".
Frankly, it makes me feel bad for Chris Lattner. This guy's been worked his ass off to create a genuinely new language with all the bells and whistles he can fit, and his employer is the one that held him back the most. It took years for Foundation framework to get serious multiplatform commitment, and unless something changes drastically I think that's going to be the sour taste that developers have in their mouths.
Apple in general seems to only understand software development through the lens of oppressive control. Maybe that's a security imperative for consumer products, but in Open Source it is an outright suicide pact. You have to treat every major platform as a first-class target, otherwise the major platforms will all switch to something better.
But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing...
You have a stack dump, which means you will get all the information if you symbolicate your crash report. Xcode can do it for you automatically, but some manual methods also exist.
Swift outside of Xcode is a bit rough around the edges, I think because more attention goes into making Xcode friendly. I opened Xcode, made a new playground, and hit run, the code crashes and highlights the line where the error occurred in red. Not to excuse Swift's jankyness, just saying that the kind of default experience is more an IDE-first design compared to Go's very good unix-first design.
But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc.
There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all the above (and some more) is done.
For what it's worth, they ship a solid VS Code extension and LSP. Their swift-testing package is the new open source and cross-platform successor to XCTest. The same can be said of swift-foundation as compared to Foundation.
The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations.
Personally I think the main problem with the language, besides Apple's earned poor reputation in FOSS circles, is the compile times. In the source-stable era of the language I'm not sure how they can really be fixed to the degree I'd be happy with.
Are there any LLVM langs that have fast compile times? I think that just kinda comes with the territory of having that IR step + all the optimizations that happen at compile time to help runtime performance.
Your wishlist seems midly contradictory. Why does Apple need to open-source XCode if they also provide support for 3rd party IDEs (which they already do, btw)? Also what do you not like about cocoapods for package management?
Plenty of people make an incredible amount of money building apps in Swift, so your last sentence is just wrong.
And make it possible to run binaries on macOS/iOS etc without a mandatory subscription and US export controls. Without notarisation, anything made with Swift is practically unusable on Apple OSs
The discussion here reminds me so much of early C# days. It was being touted as open source and cross platform back then, and Microsoft even hired a top GNOME developer to port it to Linux and GNOME was going to be rewritten in C#. It was going to be amazing. Never quite panned out.
I think you might have the history mixed up a bit. The Mono project started without Microsoft's involvement (and they were probably even annoyed by it at the time).
GNOME was betting on their own Vala language, which is still a thing, but never really gained much traction.
Eventually Microsoft bought Mono during their embrace of open source.
Probably talking about Miguel de Icaza. I think his history is wrong though. I don't recall any talk of rewriting GNOME in C# - they were all about their pet language Vala.
And Miguel started Mono way before Microsoft made C# cross-platform. At that point they were antagonists.
I feel like Swift is being held hostage by Apple. I can't get get the next version of Swift, because it's being distributed with a higher version of Xcode that only runs on an OS version I don't want to install (yet), and even if I did, I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that. That trick seems to work with enough developers to make Apple ever more rich and powerful and even more arrogant (if that's possible at all), but it doesn't work with me. As much as I appreciate Swift, I will only ever use it on my terms, not on Apple's.
> With this release, SwiftPM now has the opportunity to offer a unified build execution engine across all platforms.
this is what the big deal is. it might not achieve much on its own immediately, but this is the key to build a truly multiplatform ecosystem of libraries, tools and applications in Swift. we should expect to see more of that soon.
Apple’s software decisions over the last 15 years have created significant friction for developers trying to build on their platforms. Apple’s approach to software development has felt like it’s prioritizing business interests over the ease and flexibility that developers need to build high-quality, useful software.
Swift is a nice language. I'm glad to see it being released from the clutches of Apple. I can only imagine how large of a task this is. I hope some day to be able to use it. The last time I tried a cross-platform project with it I switched languages due to `URLSession.shared.data` (a network request) being unable to compile on Linux.
Is it really being released? Although some parts of the language and build chains are technically open source (as in, you can see the code), the project is still completely controlled by Apple at the top.
You are wrong about "some parts" - you can browse github.com/swiftlang to find out.
About control - serious question: how is this different from for example Rust, Go, Zig or Python? For each of those you can submit a change proposal through an official process and you can submit code changes through a pull request.
But also for each of those there is a non-zero chance that a smaller group of people who do governance of the project, the core team or leads or module owners, will either tell you that your proposal or code change is not appropriate or compatible with the project's goals or they will help you to merge it. That is exactly the same for Swift.
Why is Apple suddenly a dictator while every other project also has an agenda and strict rules that are being enforced?
Is the expectation to just be able to do whatever you want in a project like Swift?
They have also been working on a completely open source version of the Foundation library for use on Linux and other platforms. (IIRC the URLSession type is part of Foundation, as are many core building blocks that you need for making a real application.)
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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.
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.
That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.
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.
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.
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.
This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.
Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Python/Kotlin/Rust/etc.
Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety by default.
The creator of Clang and LLVM also created Swift, and interoperability with C was an explicit design goal.
So Swift offers the memory safety and data race safety of Rust, in a compiled language, without giving up tight integration with C.
(To be fair, better C integration is something the Rust community is looking to add.)
"Best" obviously means different things to different people, but at least by market share, macOS has never been the best. Modern Apple doesn't seem to care about market share outside of the iPhone (and even then, they are still more interested in the iPhone being a premium product than winning on market share).
I used to like macOS, 15-20 years ago, but now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy. That's not the way to be "best", by any metric I can think of.
Kotlin depends on the JVM and is also not compiled.
Rust? Now you're talking. Except that it has warts, too.
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.
A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.
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#.
You can also make the change in your own fork and use that.
This is exactly how for example the Rust or Python open source projects work. And like those projects you can look at the Swift proposals and code to see _numerous_ cases where people did bother to bother the team with change requests or directly contributed to those improvements.
It is all open source. Check it out.
b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.
Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.
See C#/.Net Core. It runs on Linux for so many years. But people still treat it as "Microsoft's thing".
uh, wasn't .NET open-sourced under exactly the same pro/con, except towards Windows hegemony?
Apple in general seems to only understand software development through the lens of oppressive control. Maybe that's a security imperative for consumer products, but in Open Source it is an outright suicide pact. You have to treat every major platform as a first-class target, otherwise the major platforms will all switch to something better.
But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing...
Is all you have to do to reproduce the error.The error looks something like that https://pastebin.com/MQV82SaR
And gives you no useful information as to how it happened or how to fix it.
compare that with Golang which tells you, it happened in main.go at line 4.
EDIT: with the LLVM_SYMBOLIZER_PATH set https://pastebin.com/8M9Dbrgj this doesn't provide anything useful either.Maybe the friendly default would be to have the symbolicated reports on, but perhaps this has performance impact so it’s off.
``` swift_hello_main + 322 in swift-hello at /home/fermi/Documents/temp/swift-hello/Sources/main.swift:64:8
```>Stack dump without symbol names (ensure you have llvm-symbolizer in your PATH or set the environment var `LLVM_SYMBOLIZER_PATH` to point to it):
?
https://pastebin.com/8M9Dbrgj
Not sure how that's any better... I still have no idea that the error occurred on line 2
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https://monosnap.com/file/qhlwD6aXUW5bcl3TV5lPmKFDgjWDtD
How would I ever know what caused the crash?
when I compile using `swiftc main.swift` and run with `./main`, the error seems even more useless.
all I get is:
But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc.
There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all the above (and some more) is done.
The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations.
Personally I think the main problem with the language, besides Apple's earned poor reputation in FOSS circles, is the compile times. In the source-stable era of the language I'm not sure how they can really be fixed to the degree I'd be happy with.
Plenty of people make an incredible amount of money building apps in Swift, so your last sentence is just wrong.
Cocoapods is too old and bad for modern era package management. It’s not made for swift also.
GNOME was betting on their own Vala language, which is still a thing, but never really gained much traction.
Eventually Microsoft bought Mono during their embrace of open source.
The only UNIX Microsoft has ever supported during pre-Satya days, was Rotor for FreeBSD, nothing else.
Mono and DotGNU had nothing to do with Microsoft until Xamarin acquisition.
I don't know what you're talking about, honestly. Maybe you're many years behind the current state of affairs.
.NET (core) is a very real thing. A extremely successful and powerful multi platform framework.
Do you have a source for the GNOME C# claim? I can't find one.
And Miguel started Mono way before Microsoft made C# cross-platform. At that point they were antagonists.
XCode has been compared to many things, but at 3.1 stars on the App store, one must find that it is still slightly overrated.
https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/getting-started...
You can get it bundled with Xcode as well if you’d like, but it’s not necessary.
Apple's ethos for a long time have been "On our terms only", for almost everything they've built. Why would they treat Swift any differently?
Which means you are running Mojave and your Mac is at least 6 years old.
I wouldn't expect anyone to support developers who are running a two generation old OS.
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(Here's a bad one: I accidentally copied a whole file into the Find and Replace box. Instant Freeze and 1 frame per minute response.)
> With this release, SwiftPM now has the opportunity to offer a unified build execution engine across all platforms.
this is what the big deal is. it might not achieve much on its own immediately, but this is the key to build a truly multiplatform ecosystem of libraries, tools and applications in Swift. we should expect to see more of that soon.
About control - serious question: how is this different from for example Rust, Go, Zig or Python? For each of those you can submit a change proposal through an official process and you can submit code changes through a pull request.
But also for each of those there is a non-zero chance that a smaller group of people who do governance of the project, the core team or leads or module owners, will either tell you that your proposal or code change is not appropriate or compatible with the project's goals or they will help you to merge it. That is exactly the same for Swift.
Why is Apple suddenly a dictator while every other project also has an agenda and strict rules that are being enforced?
Is the expectation to just be able to do whatever you want in a project like Swift?