[kelnos]

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.

[liontwist]

.net core is one of the best ways to write linux backend applications.

[pl4nty]

this, because msft spent years and many $$$ to build an open-source ecosystem. apple hasn't done that yet, so I'm not sure why anyone would trust them

[stephen_g]

Amazing that you comment that on an announcement that is one large effort of many that Apple have been doing to build an open-source ecosystem over many years...

[WuxiFingerHold]

> This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.

[aryonoco]

I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps).

Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE.

C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong type safety, etc. All the things you need to build out the logic of business applications. And it's fully open source.

I have looked at Swift. By comparison, the tooling is 10 years behind and the performance is not even close. I struggle to see what Swift brings to the table over C#.

[benbristow]

If you want to use Visual Studio Code the 'DevKit' extension which provides essential features (language server) is proprietary and requires a Visual Studio licence regardless of platform.

Also I find since C# is an 'enterprise' language developers take the p--s in what they want to charge for, as enterprise will pay as a 'cost of doing business'. Recently FluentAssertions, a freakin test assertion library decided they wanted to charge for newer versions. You don't get that in other languages like Python/Ruby etc.

https://youtu.be/ZFc6jcaM6Ms

Don't get me wrong, C# is my dayjob and I love the language but for personal projects where I don't have the money I'd be hesitant to touch it.

[neonsunset]

DevKit is completely optional.

The language server is part of the SDK itself. The language server integration, debugger and all the features that make VS Code a good tool to write C# in are a part of base C# extension which is MIT-licensed and has no commercial restrictions whatsoever.

The only "wart" is that "vsdbg" - debugger it ships with is closed-source because it is essentially the same debugger as in Visual Studio but extracted into a standalone cross-platform component. There is an open alternative "NetCoreDbg" used by the extension fork for VSCodium (and various DAP bridges to Neovim, Emacs, etc.).

[metaltyphoon]

Go to definition still broken on neovim for me :/. I should be seeing SourceLinked stuff but nothing happens

[WuxiFingerHold]

I used C# on .NET framework (the old .NET running only on Windows) 10 years ago at work. Then I had to use it 2 years ago again, and man, did it change! ASP.NET Minimal API is absolutely awesome, as the Generic Host integrating config, logging and DI is a great too. A very mature and complete framework.

It brings everything to the table a great modern language and ecosystem needs. Even null safety.

Regarding error handling, I don't have a strong opinion yet. I think Rust has nailed it, but C# (with unchecked exceptions) didn't create any issues in the projects I worked on.

[codr7]

Sorry to hear that, I wouldn't bet anything on Apple but the core language contains a lot of good ideas imho.

[nwienert]

Seems lovely but headed in a Scala-like bloated direction. The "too complex" type issues were really bad last I tried.

And one of my biggest gripes is the way you can extend things from anywhere else, easy to cause a mess.

[metaltyphoon]

Swift is getting out of hand after Chris left and Swift UI was introduced. The language has over 210 keywords… thats crazy

[saagarjha]

Keywords are a bad way to judge a language.

[metaltyphoon]

Not saying you are wrong but tell me why it would be a good idea to have hundreds of keywords for a programming language.

[saagarjha]

Because not having hundreds of keywords means that either you have some parts of the language that are "this has a special meaning please don't touch" (double underscores are good enough, right guys?) or "we reassigned 10 different things to the same keyword to keep the number low" (ahem, static).

[codr7]

Hm, I have to admit I have the same feeling.

But it is a shame, because many of the ideas are good imho.

[moooo99]

I’ve spent some time looking into swift as well and was quite pleased with the overall language, it really contained some really good ideas. This makes it a bit of a shame that it is tied so closely to Apple