Swift

“has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance”

“Have automatic resource management as default, with additional type system abilities for low level coding.”

“Swift is very powerful and Kotlin, in all honesty, is the first reasonable and very useful thing to come to the JRE ecosystem”

“He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning.”

“it is totally fine to some big corpo like the much-disloved-yet-selling-shitloads-of-phones Apple to actually do something which benefits the world”

“Developers who are deliberately outside the Apple ecosystem are generally not interested in a programming language controlled by Apple.”

“I migrated a C 200k LOC personal project to Swift over the last ~4 years and it's gone really well.”

“Honestly Swift is a pleasure to read. I love the guard statements and the enum values starting with a dot.”

“Swift takes the right approach in language ergonomics, many of its use cases would be much harder with explicit .clone() all over the place”

“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”

“Coming from the awesome project of Swift, which to their credit, was a massive undertaking to convince Apple execs”

“the improvements in embedded Swift have definitely made it one of the most enjoyable/productive languages to work on the OS”

“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.”

“unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++”

“doubling down in automatic memory management with a good enough ownership model for low level coding, e.g. Swift 6”

“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”

“the sentiment that Swift and Mojo and LLVM are these awful abominations is beyond the pale for me from an engineering standpoint”

“Swift has it's problems, and I certainly wouldn't use it for anything outside of development for Apple platforms”

“I personally think it is way more ergonomic to write than most languages, especially for UI and app-level stuff”

“Outside macOS/iOS devs wanting to share code with server side, I don't see a use case, given the more mature alternatives.”

“I wrote an entire, well performing backend in Swift because I could just directly plug in to already existing libraries”

“the almost complete absence of packages that run on Windows makes the progress made so far more of a curiosity than a usable option”

“Swift's happy path is pretty good, i.e. when you want to use a recent-ish toolchain to develop IOS applications”

“Swift is unique among high-level languages in that the mental effort required to do many simple things rivals that of a low-level language.”

“My experience is that it is very frustrating. Apple's documentation makes no mention of what works on Linux and its limitations”

“You get the bare bones standard library, some of it still WIP, and naturally most libraries were written expecting an Apple platform.”

“It's also a rather simple language, unlike Swift (which I wish was simpler because it's a really nice language otherwise).”

“Swift actually has plenty of sugar but it puts it in places that don't compromise static analysis.”

“I personally don't enjoy the MyObject? typing, because it leads to edge cases where you'd like to have MyObject??”

“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.”

“None of the safeties promised by Swift 6 are worth the burnout that would come with trying to keep all this crap in one's mind.”

“it's an amazing, very concise and expressive language that allows you to be as minimalist as you like”

“They definitely want to tell everybody that Swift is multiplatform, giving cloud services, command line tools and embedded development more prominence than iOS apps.”

“Swift's huge advantage over Rust, for application and system programming is that it supports an ABI”

“the code in question was also a confused mess around it and had a number of fairly serious and real concurrency issues”

“the need to resolve unscoped enum values, combined with type inference, is one of the things that makes the Swift compiler so slow”

“Apple continues to make business sense for me, for what I build and who my customers are. And thus Swift.”

“Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages less compelling”

“languages like Rust and Swift can be better than C for perf-critical things because of the immutability guarantees”

“I have personally found this sufficiently limiting that I've given up using typed throws in the few places I want to”