Re:Swift Ownership Manifesto
by heavyset_go on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @07:11PM
(#36220386)
Swift is next to useless on any platform other than Apple's.
Re:Swift Ownership Manifesto
by wahnfrieden on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @07:27PM
(#36220531)
That's your uninformed opinion
Swift is most comparable to Kotlin in the current crop of languages and the Kotlin team is doing their best to get multiplatform, backend, KotlinJS, and native everywhere. Kotlin dominates Android obviously, but is growing quickly on the backend. The other implementations are still early but they continue to be improved.
I don't see Swift anywhere outside of Apple and don't see why anyone would reach for it instead of Kotlin.
It also doesn't help that JetBrains has an IDE that makes development in the language so nice people are willing to pay for it and Xcode easily is the worst user experience of any current product developed by Apple.
I see people claim this frequently that Kotlin is used a lot on the backend, but there’s very little evidence that this is true.
I absolutely will concede that Swift is in practice an Apple only language, but I feel Kotlin is essentially an Android only language in practice as well.
We had a bunch of Kotlin on the server at Airbnb in 2018.
Nope, Kotlin is plenty popular on backend, so much so it's mundane to see it in popular frameworks like Spring and Play. It helps that it's designed to coexist with Java.
It is almost meaningless, about 10% if at all.
DoorDash moved their python backend to kotlin afaik
Re:Swift Ownership Manifesto
by heavyset_go on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @08:54PM
(#36221321)
It's my experience as someone who wants to use Swift on something other than macOS/iOS.
About a year ago, Swift on linux was a bit of a minefield. Only parts of Foundation were implemented, and you couldn't use the Linux toolkit on a Mac to cross-compile or even just link against the Linux version of Foundation. The recentish move to reimplement Foundation in Swift natively is a big win, and I haven't tracked how close that project is.
> and I haven't tracked how close that project is.
It's a while away yet. Exciting prospect though!
Swift on the server is really quite well supported now. Frameworks like Vapor work fully, there's a thriving ecosystem. And above all, Apple clearly wants this to work. Apple aren't deploying macOS servers for their backend services.
You forgot Windows, Linux, WASM in browser, WASI envs