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by hu3 502 days ago
> people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.

This is a rather small userbase when it comes to enterprise.

Especially because Swift will never be as versatile as Python or as efficient as Rust.

And then there's also Go, C# and Kotlin with much better tooling.

2 comments

Xcode gives me such a hard time that I started considering writing in Kotlin for macOS, just to have a normal IDE. We used to have AppCode (from JetBrains) and it was great. I wonder why Apple didn't support JetBrains, after all, it would have been to Apple's benefit.
Personally, I never liked AppCode. It was too much like Eclipse (which I also never liked).

Me not liking something, does not make it bad. It’s just not my choice. I’m glad it existed, because it probably prompted Apple to do better with Xcode. Lots of people that I respect, used it.

These days, Xcode is Big Bug Ranch. When “Delete the DerivedData folder” is S. O. P. for developers, and Apple tweaked Xcode to reduce its impact on the project, you know that they have waved a white flag to bugs.

There's even history of it working before, with Google / Kotlin
Since Apple has moved themselves out of the server market, folks need to at least be able to target BSD/Linux server workloads, and naturally using Swift as well instead of another language is a desired option.