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belmont_sup commented on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption   github.com/LadybirdBrowse... · Posted by u/thewavelength
miffy900 · 23 days ago
As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#?

And this was me trying to use Swift for a data access layer + backend web API. There's barely any guidance or existing knowledge on using Swift for backend APIs, let alone a web browser of all projects.

There's no precedent or existing implementation you can look at for reference; known best practices in Swift are geared almost entirely towards using it with Apple platform APIs, so tons of knowledge about using the language itself simply cannot be applied outside the domain of building client-running apps for Apple hardware.

To use swift outside its usual domain is to become a pioneer, and try something truly untested. It was always a longshot.

belmont_sup · 23 days ago
Not to mention how heated my laptop gets when I try to compile a new vapor template. On an m1.
belmont_sup commented on Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)   nmn.sh/blog/2023-10-02-sw... · Posted by u/behnamoh
hn-acct · a month ago
Agreed. People use any thread mentioning swift to dunk on Apple for X number of reasons with vague details and regurgitated dogma. I get Xcode has quirks I use it everyday believe me I know but it's not that bad that it's unusable.
belmont_sup · a month ago
I recently really wanted to use Swift server side because of all the updates to Vapor.

Ran vapor new. Tried to build the project. Laptop spun for minutes and got really hot. Then I gave up and just went back to the usual.

belmont_sup commented on 2025: The Year in LLMs   simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw
mgfist · 2 months ago
Because that requires adoption. Devs on hackernews are already the most up to date folks in the industry and even here adoption of LLMs is incredibly slow. And a lot of the adoption that does happen is still with older tech like ChatGPT or Cursor.
belmont_sup · 2 months ago
What’s the newer tech?
belmont_sup commented on Show HN: I am self-hosting a time-sorted list of top STEM, Arts and Design posts   limereader.com/... · Posted by u/busymom0
belmont_sup · 4 months ago
This is wonderful! Love the technology choices. Very hn-in-the-flavor. Bookmarked and will try my daily reading on it.

I’m considering the use of swift and vapor for my new ideas too, over kotlin.

belmont_sup commented on What .NET 10 GC changes mean for developers   roxeem.com/2025/09/30/wha... · Posted by u/roxeem
badhombres · 5 months ago
The trade offs are though that patterns and behind the scenes source code generation is another layer that the devs who have to follow need to deal with when debugging and understanding why something isn’t working. They either spend more time understanding the bespoke things or are bottle necked relying on a team or person to help them get through those moments. It’s a trade off and one that has bit me and others before
belmont_sup · 5 months ago
It has been worth the abstraction in my organization with many teams. Thinking 1000+ engineers, at minimum. It helps to abstract as necessary for new teammates that want to simply add a new endpoint yet follow all the legal, security, and data enforcement rules.

Better than no magic abstractions imo. In our large monorepo, LSP feedback can often be so slow that I can’t even rely on it to be productive. I just intuit and pattern match, and these magical abstractions do help. If I get stuck, then I’ll wade into the docs and code myself, and then ask the owning team if I need more help.

belmont_sup commented on Redesigned Swift.org is now live   swift.org/... · Posted by u/lawgimenez
miffy900 · 9 months ago
I tried seeing how it ranks on the 2025 tech empower benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v...

And up against C#, Go and C++, Vapor could not make the top 70.

Even just compare Swift vs PHP and its a really poor showing for vapor: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v...

belmont_sup · 9 months ago
Probably a bad benchmark. I see that a recent blog post on the swift site discusses a migration of a large service from Java to swift using vapor.
belmont_sup commented on Redesigned Swift.org is now live   swift.org/... · Posted by u/lawgimenez
timsneath · 9 months ago
belmont_sup · 9 months ago
What about a formatter? I recall having to figure out which library to install as binary just to do formatting. What do you do?
belmont_sup commented on Redesigned Swift.org is now live   swift.org/... · Posted by u/lawgimenez
bigyabai · 9 months ago
They deserve it. Look, Microsoft and Meta and Google are all evil companies too, but all of them actually make good-faith contributions to Open Source projects. Meta maintains React.js and Zstd, Microsoft does tons of open work on Typescript, VS Code and the Linux Kernel. Google handles the AOSP, Blink Engine, Go, Angular, JAX, Grpc... the list goes on. They're brimming with genuine, self-evident goodwill, even when their businesses detract from humanity.

So; what exactly are Apple's big, selfless contributions? XNU is Source Availible but unusable without buying proprietary Apple hardware. iBoot is mysterious and has to be reverse-engineered to use it like UEFI. Open standards like Vulkan are ignored for political reasons, CUPS is basically derelict, WebKit killed KHTML because sharing was too hard, and APFS and Metal are still both undocumented despite promised transparency. CoreML is proprietary but can't compete with CUDA, iPads can't use QEMU despite supporting it in-hardware, all the Apple Silicon DeviceTree code is private, competing runtimes like Corellium get sued and security researchers get ignored. Swift, as an offering to the Open Source community, is a punch line at the end of a 20 year long gag.

Apple does genuinely nothing to advance the wellbeing of common computing for mankind. Apple leaves behind no charitable contributions to anything that does not ensure their absolute preservation as a business. Combined with the proven anticompetitive damages that the App Store incurs on the burgeoning mobile market, they are unequivocally a net-negative force and aren't hated enough for their parasitic influence on global software production.

belmont_sup · 9 months ago
You make a convincing case.
belmont_sup commented on Pyrefly vs. Ty: Comparing Python's two new Rust-based type checkers   blog.edward-li.com/tech/c... · Posted by u/edwardjxli
whyho · 9 months ago
Astral tooling is great and brings new energy into python land but what is the long game of all astral projects? Integrate them into python natively? Be gone in 5 years and leave unmaintained tooling behind? Rug pull all of us with a subscription?
belmont_sup · 9 months ago
As a Redditor said:

> The standard VC business model is to invest in stuff that FAANG will buy from them one day. The standard approach is to invest in stuff that's enough of a threat to FAANG that they'll buy it to kill it, but this seems more like they're gambling on an acqui-hire in the future.

belmont_sup commented on Pyrefly vs. Ty: Comparing Python's two new Rust-based type checkers   blog.edward-li.com/tech/c... · Posted by u/edwardjxli
MeetingsBrowser · 9 months ago
> teams can always add runtime checks like pydantic to ensure your types match reality.

That's the problem with bugs though, there's always something that could have been done to avoid it =)

Pydantic works great in specific places, like validating user supplied data, but runtime checks as a replacement for static type checkers are not really feasible.

Every caller would need to check that the function is being called correctly (number and position of args, kwarg names, etc) and every callee would need to manually validate that each arg passed matches some expected type.

belmont_sup · 9 months ago
To be clear, I myself prefer sound type systems.

But the reality is that teams have started with untyped Python, Ruby, and Javascript, have been productive, and now need to gradually add static types to remain productive.

> Every caller would need to check that the function...

The nice part here is where the gradual part comes in. As you are able to type more of your code, you're able to move where you add your runtime validation, and eventually you'll be able to move all validation to the edges of your system.

u/belmont_sup

KarmaCake day79June 16, 2022View Original