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.
Re:Swift is a more convenient Rust
by heavyset_go on Saturday January 31, 2026 @07:44PM
(#46842492)
It's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol
> 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)