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by neilv
482 days ago
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Has/will Swift be sufficiently disentangled from Apple influence? And is this redirecting open source in an essentially proprietary direction (which has happened many times), on the key piece of software that is the Web browser? Why I'm asking: For a startup, I've used Swift (and SwiftUI, various Apple APIs, "entitlements", developer-hostile App Store experience, often nonexistent documentation). The core language is OK overall (not great). But most of the rest of the developer experience was awful, due to Apple. And you need a lot of pieces beyond the core language. Ultimately, the people who fund/do the work get to decide how they do it. I personally wouldn't invest in increasing open source adoption of an Apple property like that, unless someone has a compelling new argument for that. |
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See here for his reasoning for picking Swift: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
> Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
> First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
> Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
> The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.