[ElFitz]

It's a fully fledged programming language. An open-source programming language, at that, with a lot of community input and involvement.

Not a macOS or iOS app creation DSL.

It's also quite pleasant to use, and has already seen a few uses beyond macOS and iOS apps, including some backend development (Vapor, Kitura, SwiftNIO, probably others).

So you could use it to write command line tools. To write Linux or Windows apps. Or to write servers. Just like any other programming language.

[jbverschoor]

I'd say swift is currently probably the best languages out there. Language features, standard library, performance, memory management.

[blauditore]

I'm curious, how do people judge this?

Personally I have some significant experience with maybe 5 different languages, which is already more diverse than the average software dev as far as I know. But I still wouldn't be comfortable to judge something like this.

For instance, I haven't worked with Swift, but I find it hard to believe it's much better than, say, C#, Scala, or Typescript, regarding those metrics. Do you have experience in those languages?

[dimatura]

It's subjective, naturally. I don't know if I'd be that enthusiastic, but I definitely like it a lot.

My main languages are Python and C++. I've also used Java, C#, Javascript but not Typescript, among others.

In my opinion Swift does a pretty good job at striking a balance between expressiveness/usability, safety and performance. If it gets more traction under Linux (including a larger ecosystem and better tooling around it) I'd definitely consider it for projects where Python could become a bottleneck but C++-level performance is not absolutely required.

On the other hand, other languages in a similar niche - Rust, Go, even D or Nim? are already more established outside of iOS/MacOS, so I don't know. My experience with Swift has definitely made me more interested in learning Rust, which seems quite similar in some respects.

[DagAgren]

Agreed. I have not seen any other language that is as pleasant to use. It is not perfect, but everything else is even further from perfect.