[melling]

Swift is changing fast. Chris Lattner has stated that Apple will have a good migration solution to update current Swift code. If Apple does it right, Swift will be a major cross platform language within a few years.

You can argue that Rust, Nim, or Go are better, for example, but the community and support Apple give Swift give it a big advantage. Simply look at the number of Swift books published in the first 18 months:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/books

[themartorana]

If anything, I'd argue that we're in the middle of a fantastic time for languages. I have at my disposal Go, Rust, Swift, and Nim, not to mention a re-emergence of Erlang (and birth of Elixir), Clojure on the JVM (and what the heck, Java)...

There's so much happening in languages now, it's a wonderful time to be a developer! People will always argue about which is the best, why Go needs generics, etc., but when you're a "right tool for the job" kind of developer, your toolbox is looking pretty sweet right about now.

[alblue]

We are indeed in a great space right now.

At QConLondon next week, I'm hosting the "Modern Native Langauges" track which will have presentations on Rust, Go, Pony and Swift:

https://qconlondon.com/track/modern-native-languages

The presentations are being recorded and will be published at http://www.infoq.com/qcon-london-2016/ over the next few months (you can see last year's conference content at http://www.infoq.com/qcon-london-2015/ if you're interested).

It's certainly a great time to be a developer with an interest in languages!

[pjmlp]

Sadly many of us don't get to chose what languages are used at work.

[alblue]

You have my Swift Essentials book listed (one of the first, published in 2014) but the second edition came out covering Swift 2 last month:

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/swift-essen...

There's a discount available until 20th March:

50% on eBook: SSEE50 30% on Print: SSEE30

[mrdrozdov]

Wouldn't code released be a better measuring stick?

[melling]

There are a lot of a Swift GitHub projects.

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?q=github.com&age=10...

[clouddrover]

RedMonk publishes a language index which charts a language's GitHub and Stack Overflow ranking. Swift has risen quickly in the rankings: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/02/19/language-rankings-1-1...

[pjmlp]

For that to happen, they need to have the compiler target more than just OS X, iOS and GNU/Linux.

[clouddrover]

There are some porting efforts underway in the early stages of development.

SwiftAndroid: https://github.com/SwiftAndroid

Swift for Cygwin: https://github.com/tinysun212/swift-cygwin-bin

[pjmlp]

I am curious to see if Microsoft is going to support it in their iOS bridge for Windows.

I see Swift more as a way to bring FP concepts to the masses via the desire to target iOS/AppStore.

Personally I am already sold to other ML influenced languages.

[clouddrover]

I hope so since the goal of the iOS bridge is to get as many iOS applications on Windows as possible. Maybe after (or in conjunction with) Swift 3.0.

Don't see it on their roadmap: https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/wiki/Roadmap

But there's an open issue for it so that's promising: https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/issues/25

[clouddrover]

And it sounds like FreeBSD support is on the way: https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-dev/Week-of-Mon-2016...