First sentence of the wiki page [1]:

> Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community.

As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)

Swift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.

> The community was very against function builders.

Scanning the multiple review threads, that doesn't appear to be the case. According to the acceptance post, the community was overall positive about the feature but expressed concerns over the attribute naming, which was renamed in response.

Read the thread reviewing the proposal.

Just like Go's dependency and package management, Google also bullied the community into their own solution.

I'd bet a supermajority of Swift commits comes from Apple developers. Pretty sure the rust-lang/rust commit authors would be much less centralized.

Yup just like google doesn’t actually control chromium right

I know Swift is technically not Apple specific, but it says right there in your quote that it was created for Apple and Apple is the giant weight behind it.

I doubt Apple is in danger of dropping Swift, but if they did it would create a devastating vacuum in the Swift ecosystem.

But the fact remains that if Apple abandoned Swift tomorrow the language would almost certainly wither and die.

It's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol

A lot of Apple's software is written in Swift now. It's probably not in their interest to abandon the language.

I mean they did switch from objective c. At some point they might switch again if it makes sense.

Especially if the promise of coding agents porting between languages is even partially realised it could make it very easy for them to switch.

I mean, after some almost 40 years. If 40 years from now, hell, even 20, Apple abandoned the language I’m not sure I care about the risk.

And that’s not to say they don’t support objective-c still. It just hasn’t been actively developed with new features.

> I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked.

Go's development is tied to Google Inc. and is widely used at Google. Same with Microsoft's C# with .NET and Swift isn't very different to this as long as it is open source.

So this really is a moot point.

IMHO your case for a moot point would be stronger if you also mentioned which company you feel is tied to Rust in the same way as the other languages you've mentioned.

Go has a critical mass that Swift clearly doesn't (i.e. there are many, many companies who have net profits of >$1bn and write most of their server software in Go).

Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift (and where Google does publish public Go APIs it also tends to use them in the same way as their users do, so the interests are more aligned)...

> Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift

Hmm, Apple isn't selling Swift as a product either; it's literally what they needed for their own platform, much like how GOOG needed Go for their server works.

Apple is selling Swift as a product - it is their preferred interface for constructing iOS applications!

Kubernetes and Docker, CNCF is full of commercial products.

Go is an implementation detail for Kubernetes and Docker...

Objective-C had its own open source source implementations, along with a better cross-platform story than Swift has ever had, and yet Apple's abandonment still managed to reduce it to irrelevance.

I have similar concerns about c# as I do about swift.

I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS. But barely so. Also, if Google were to discontinue support, or change the license, or do something else disruptive, I have more faith that the ecosystem would create a fork to continue the language.

FWIW, my biggest concern isn't that the language would be completely abandoned, it is that the company would diminish or drop support for tooling on OSes and editors and IDEs that compete with the company's products (Mac OS and Xcode for apple, Windows and Visual Studio for MS).

Microsoft’s market position is reliant on Linux and access to Linux development to keep Azure competitive. Cross-platform capabilities on the .Net VM are critical to compete with the JVM and associated databases. C# has been windows-first for a while, but the core cross-platform capabilities are not going to disappear, the tooling is all CLI based/capable now, the entanglements tend to be platform and service based.

That said, F# was years ahead of C# in features C# is still chasing, and is driven mostly by the open source community. That community is more in academic and finance areas where Linux-first is common. The language is standardized and plugged into VM improvements over time.

Frankly, I see the lesser degree of entanglement with MS corporate interests as a boon for the language and its ecosystems long-term utility.

From what I understand, LSP support for c# isn't very good, and is from third parties, not MS themselves, because they want you to us Visual Studio on Windows.

Microsoft provides C# LSP for VSCode (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...).

The problem is that it's closed source, and its license specifically prohibits its use with anything other than VSCode. Unfortunately, this is becoming the usual modus operandi for first-party Microsoft extensions for VSCode for all the talk about how they "love open source".

> I'm less concerned about go, because unlike swift and c# it was designed from the beginning to be cross-platform and if anything Linux is the best supported OS

No it wasn’t. There were so many foot guns for windows and in fact to this day you cant use CGO with MSVC (insane to me).

I can’t even say with a straight face today that Windows is the best supported OS for C#, because it’s not true

If we're going to be concerned about any language languishing due to a lack of support... like, I don't think people are going to put "Apple dropping support" as anywhere near their shortlist. Rust has a higher risk of losing support.

Apple was the primary and only major sponsor of Objective-C, used it as the core foundation of their entire platform, and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony. Yes, being tied so closely to Apple is an existential risk for Swift. One need only look at the quality and trajectory of MacOS to see that Apple isn't a software company, let alone a company that cares about developer experience (Xcode, anyone?). As far as modern Apple is concerned, the primary benefit of Swift is that it produces a tiny bit extra lock-in for iOS apps, by making cross-platform development more difficult.

People still write applications in Objective-C (e.g., see Transmission [1]), and the language is still maintained to support the latest OS. If anything, Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift, since you can at least use the latter outside of Apple platforms (e.g., on a server).

[1]: https://github.com/transmission/transmission

> Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift

Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2].

[1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2

[2] https://www.gnustep.org/

Yes, but does anyone today really do that? The only value I see out of Objective-C on its own is as a performant and compromising Smalltalk.

Only if you enjoy being stuck in something like Panther and Objective-C 1.x.

Objective-C is as dead because of Swift as C is because of Rust, which is to say, "not very".

Objective-C remains a first-class iOS development language, and there's no sign of that changing for at least another decade.

Although the only framework that was developed in Objective-C after Swift got introduced was Metal, anything else is mostly maintenance and incremental improvements.

"and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony"

What?! This is complete nonsense. Swift was introduced 11 (!) years ago and it was clear from day one that it was going to be the future. Every single year since the introduction there were clear messages and hints in documentation and WWDC that Swift is in and Objective-C will _eventually_ be out.

Little warning? Maybe if you kept your eyes closed the past 11 years.

And do not forget that today you can still write apps in Objective-C.

Whether or not Apple still has legacy pieces in Objective-C or still allows you to write apps in it is not the issue. The point here is that Apple shadow-dropped Swift and shifted essentially all of its development priority away from Objective-C in a matter of months.

I think that is a pretty inaccurate description of what happened the past 11 years.

I'm old enough to remember when Objective-C was a real and thriving (if niche) language. I remember all the buzz when automatic reference counting was the next big thing, pushed heavily by Apple and taking center stage at WWDC. And since the year Swift came out, Objective-C has joined Cobol in the category of zombie languages: the living dead with plenty of entrenced codebases but with nothing to look forward to but a continued slide into technological irrelevance.

Such bullshit, macOS is the best OS for power users.

MacOS was only the best OS for power users between 1994 and 2008, at which point they shifted to x86.

And it still is the best OS for power users.

Power users of Subway Surfers, maybe. Modern macOS is a tragedy: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/12/is-apple-keeping-its-pro...

Dude, this is some article from 5 years ago.

They still didn’t fix it, so

Rust of all languages, now that it's been majorly adopted by many companies big and small, has a higher risk of losing support over a language developed exclusively by one corporation? I sincerely doubt that.