[nauticacom]

Swift is an incredibly appealing language on so many fronts. It has an expressive and fairly robust type system, an excellent suite of built-in libraries, and moreso than many other languages I've used cares deeply about syntactical ergonomics (i.e. how a language construct or interface feels and reads to use).

It's so unfortunate that its tied up in the Apple ecosystem, then. Not that they don't care about it (they clearly do) but by being an Apple project first-and-foremost, it has virtually no community control—practically no community to speak of—and is unlikely to ever have real, first-class support for use-cases that Apple doesn't use it for, e.g. web apps/APIs or CLIs (where it's the most appealing, imo). This has some benefits, like adding features to the language when Apple-created designs are hard (e.g. SwiftUI), but it's overall a net negative.

Contrast this state with Rust, which has by far the best community I've encountered, and cares deeply about developer experience. Or compare it to JS, which has a clear, formal, and well-documented process for adding features to the language. If Swift were a truly open project, I'd have a hard time finding many things to dislike about it.

[ternaryoperator]

> an excellent suite of built-in libraries

I love Swift and wish I could use it more, but I can't because it does not have an excellent suite of built-in libraries. Those are almost all Mac libraries bundled with Swift. Run Swift on a non-Mac platform and the tiny set of built-in libraries is glaringly conspicuous.

[nauticacom]

That's true, I didn't even think of that! That makes it even more unfortunate