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Problem is Swift engineer supply is low, there's not a viable business case to learn Swift because it's not actually viable cross-platform for development unless you have $X00 million to throw at your macOS/iOS team to build it from scratch, platform by platform (to wit, sibling comment re: Arc Browser) So best case we're looking at: Swift isn't ready yet, the next major version will be, and we can't build UI with it, so we'll put in the effort in to bootstrap a cross-platform ecosystem and UI frameworks. Or maybe we'll just do our business logic in it? It's a confusing mess that is irrational. Even with great blessings of resources. ex. $X00M that Arc has obtained one incremental platform after a year. And "all" they had to do was Swift bindings for WinRT and connect it to the existing C++ engine. All of this is easy to justify if we treat it as an opportunity to shoot for how we wish software could work in theory, instead of practice. I hope I'm wrong but after being right the last few years, I'm willing to say it's naive wishcasting out loud, even though its boorish. I see it as unfortunately necessary, a younger me would be greatly misled by the conversations about it on HN. "We've decided to write the browser in Swift!" approaches parody levels of irresponsible resource management and is a case study in several solo engineer delusions that I also fall victim to. It's genuinely impossible for me to imagine anyone in my social circle of Apple devs, going back to 2007, who would think writing a browser engine in Swift is a good idea. I love Swift, used it since pre-1.0, immediately started shipping it after release, and that was the right decision. However, even given infinite resources and time, it is a poor fit for a browser engine, and an odd masochistic choice for cross-platform UI. |
The Swift business case is that in many situations native is strongly preferable than cross-platform. Excluding some startups that wants to go to market super fast and consulting companies that have to sell the cheapest software possible, usually the benefits of native outweighs the ones of cross platform.
For this reason now there are plenty of companies of all sizes (faangs included) that build and maintain native apps with separate iOS/Android teams. There are very good business reasons to learn Swift or Kotlin in my opinion.