[djcapelis]

I think it’s a good point actually. I think it’s reasonable to say swift isn’t intended as a language to experiment with a specific concept, it’s a six year old production language designed for a general set of usecases where it’s good at a bunch of things that the languages it is replacing weren’t as good at. There’s some interesting discussions to be had about tradeoffs it makes but a question like “what’s the one thing swift does that other languages don’t do” is not the right way to evaluate a production language. It might explain why some people don’t find it interesting but swift was built to be a better tool, not merely an interesting one.

A lot of really good programming languages are “uninteresting” in this way, and that’s probably a good sign, not a bad one.

[meragrin_]

There was no point made other than the language is 6 years old and "someone" uses it. That's nice. I'm sure I can find other languages 6 years or older which people use and are not worth using.

How long has Swift been available outside of Apple platforms? And I don't mean experimentally available either. They only posted an announcement a few days ago where Swift is deemed ready for early adopters on Windows. That certainly does not sound production quality there.

[jshier]

Swift has been officially available on Linux since it was open sourced in Dec. 2015.

[cblconfederate]

the question was in the context of swift open sourcing something. if it s an apple-ecosystem-specific language , it s not much use to the general audience