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by coldtea 3388 days ago
>Swift is fast and the language is nice and all, but this feels more like propaganda. Let's not forget IBM and Apple have become friends recently.

Let's not forget it. How does that make presenting their product propaganda any more so than any other product presentation? Heck, they even use it themselves for their backend.

>I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS.

Doesn't Apple becoming friends with IBM ensure that it will be used at least by many IBM customers? Which is quite a large potential base (and not all are happy for how Oracle moves with Java).

I also don't see why a top notch, statically compiled, very fast language, with automatic memory management, and support from a huge vendor AND a huge community AND open source, wont catch up.

>Swift can indeed run on a multitude of systems but that doesn't mean it's a good option. For example it's not even close to being ready for Android. It can run, but that's it.

That's because the work for porting properly there hasn't been done yet. But it's more or less the same with Google's own Go, which is much older than Swift, Rust, D, etc.

2 comments

> Go, which is much older than Swift, Rust, D, etc.

Go is definitely newer than D, which came out in December 2001, though D2, which is significantly different, came out in June 2007, while Go came out in November 2009. And, in the grand scheme of things, Go isn't too much older than Rust, which came out in January 2012.

Additionally, from the point of view of "no UI libs," basically every natively compiled language is at a significant disadvantage on Android, even the originally intended native language, C++ (1983).

> How does that make presenting their product propaganda any more so than any other product presentation? Heck, they even use it themselves for their backend.

There is that aspect, sure.

But what I wanted to point out is the irony of IBM promoting Swift since there isn't really any obvious advantage of using it full stack unless you are using iOS. Which happens to be the product of their new friend.

That is all.

IBM has already ported Java over to the z Systems platform. So why is them also supporting Swift a bad thing here?
I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

What I'm saying is that moving to swift full stack is only beneficial if you are using iOS or macOS on your clients.