# Swift 272 Hacker News commenters recommended Swift and 245 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5.5 years (20 owners). **Verdict:** An expressive, ergonomic language with memory and data-race safety that shines for Apple platform apps, though critics say it keeps getting more complex and is weak outside Apple's ecosystem. ## Why people recommend it - Ergonomic, expressive, readable syntax (6 comments): "Swift takes the right approach in language ergonomics, many of its use cases would be much harder with explicit .clone() all over the place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514546)) "It's also a rather simple language, unlike Swift (which I wish was simpler because it's a really nice language otherwise)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772061)) "I personally think it is way more ergonomic to write than most languages, especially for UI and app-level stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860101)) - Safety with predictable performance (5 comments): "has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945582)) "doubling down in automatic memory management with a good enough ownership model for low level coding, e.g. Swift 6" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300768)) "languages like Rust and Swift can be better than C for perf-critical things because of the immutability guarantees" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45954755)) - Great for Apple platform apps (3 comments): "Swift's happy path is pretty good, i.e. when you want to use a recent-ish toolchain to develop IOS applications" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843240)) "I personally think it is way more ergonomic to write than most languages, especially for UI and app-level stuff" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860101)) "Apple continues to make business sense for me, for what I build and who my customers are. And thus Swift." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124564)) - Viable for embedded and backend (4 comments): "has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945582)) "the improvements in embedded Swift have definitely made it one of the most enjoyable/productive languages to work on the OS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532961)) "I wrote an entire, well performing backend in Swift because I could just directly plug in to already existing libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843594)) ## What people warn about - Complexity keeps growing (6 comments): "unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47528522)) "It's far too complicated and error prone, which is why Swift designers had to radically change the defaults between Swift 6.0 and 6.2 and it's still a mess." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529463)) "as they solve more problem with Swift they also add so much complexity that you wonder if all the problems they solved just added new problems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220279)) - Weak support outside Apple platforms (7 comments): "the almost complete absence of packages that run on Windows makes the progress made so far more of a curiosity than a usable option" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843429)) "Swift has it's problems, and I certainly wouldn't use it for anything outside of development for Apple platforms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068633)) "unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47528522)) - Messy error handling and concurrency (3 comments): "I find the happy path in Swift to be lovely, but as soon as exceptions have to be handled or there's some details that have to be gotten right in terms of order of execution, everything turns into a massive mess." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439287)) "I have personally found this sufficiently limiting that I've given up using typed throws in the few places I want to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45897127)) "It's far too complicated and error prone, which is why Swift designers had to radically change the defaults between Swift 6.0 and 6.2 and it's still a mess." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529463)) - Slow, overreaching type inference (2 comments): "Swift bidirectional type inference for instance feels like it was implemented because they had a compiler algorithm that they wanted to use, rather than a genuine need" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067808)) "the need to resolve unscoped enum values, combined with type inference, is one of the things that makes the Swift compiler so slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135463)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Swift", https://hackerapproved.com/p/swift/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).