Approaches to Type Erasure in Swift (2020)

Re:Approaches to Type Erasure in Swift (2020) by skohan on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @01:24PM (#26971879)

> give it a few more years and I think it'll be a much more attractive for things outside of iOS.

I would like for this to be the case, but I'm not so confident. Even a few years ago, you had corporate investment in the form of Kitura and S4TF. Now you have a few small open source projects.

The language itself is ready, but the tooling is just not there. I think the main obstacle is the lack of investment in cross-platform support by the core team. Until I can `apt-get install swift` I don't have much confidence it can gain adoption outside of the Apple ecosystem.

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Re:Approaches to Type Erasure in Swift (2020) by indemnity on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @01:34PM (#26971992)

This is on the money. Tooling and cross platform ecosystem are a big reason I moved to Rust/Go for my server side needs.

A tar ball of something that can run on Ubuntu is simply not good enough.

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Re:Approaches to Type Erasure in Swift (2020) by joshuawright11 on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @02:18PM (#26972385)

Yeah I 100% agree that the tooling is not there outside of macOS.

That being said, it started as geared towards iOS/macOS & even so there have been decent cross platform wins (linux compiler support is pretty solid, SPM).

I hope that as the language matures the language features that have been the priority on the roadmap (async/await, generics, memory management) will give way to more cross platform tooling.

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