While interesting, Iām still waiting to see any noticeable uptake in usage outside iOS and Mac devices.
When Swift was kinda new in 2014/2015 I was skeptical it would get any meaningful market penetration when talking to a coworker who was very excited for it and had hoped to use it as a server language in the future. So far Iāve not been proven wrong.
Yeah, thatās a goal of the language team, but Iād consider this Windows release an early milestone. A lot of work is being done in the directions of platform support and concurrency syntax now that there is source and ABI stability. You can build Linux server apps today, but support has only reached a few distros and the ecosystem is still small outside of Apple platforms.
I think there is a cultural challenge waiting too, since so far the Swift community has only really been engaged with the part of the broader dev community that was perhaps pro-Apple. Itās a great language, but its origin would color your first impressions.
I have nothing against Swift, it seems like a decent language.
In general Iām a little wary of things pushed by one big company. Rust was a little bit of an exception here because Mozilla had been doing open source for a long time.
But Iām simply not excited for Swift and that is on top of my fear the development will be strictly according to Appleās internal plans. From what I heard people are happy with for developing iOS apps, but that is simply a niche market and if you take away ObjC interop there arenāt many real benefits left for us outsiders.
If it helps, the Swift evolution process is public, and public proposals are how it works. That has been going on since the language was publicized in 2014. There are reasonable concerns that Apple will serve their own interests first, so I donāt blame anyone for their healthy skepticism.
The language is, however, intended to be general-purpose and useful for everything from applications down to systems-level work. Applications are where it began and is strongest. Server work and platform support are underway but not there yet, and systems level work is a later goal.
Objective-C interop is really not a star feature for anyone but us Apple devs, for whom it remains a requirement. I donāt think youāll be missing much by not having that part of the tooling on other platforms; it is really just a necessary feature to slowly migrate Appleās platforms off of ObjC.
What you can look forward to is a C-like language with an excellent type system, memory safety, performance, and stable syntax and ABI so new language versions donāt break your work. Iāll oversimplify it as being like Rust except you donāt have to mess with the borrow checker or lifetimes. (Until the systems-level work goes in, that is, and then ownership features are suggested to be opt-in.)
The reason Iām excited for Swift on Windows is that itās one more step into that general purpose domain and away from being useful only on Apple platforms. I want to use this language more of the time. Iāve been away from it for two years writing TypeScript and I canāt wait for Swift to serve broader purposes.
I wonder how much use itāll get, especially seeing as that example seemed to use its own Win32 bindings for UI. IBM didnāt really have much luck popularizing Swift on Linux servers (even going through the effort to port it to z).
I honestly thought that swift was already on windows. š
Yeah, I think there had been work done in that direction and a project leader selected, but this seems to be the first actual release of the effort.
While interesting, Iām still waiting to see any noticeable uptake in usage outside iOS and Mac devices.
When Swift was kinda new in 2014/2015 I was skeptical it would get any meaningful market penetration when talking to a coworker who was very excited for it and had hoped to use it as a server language in the future. So far Iāve not been proven wrong.
Yeah, thatās a goal of the language team, but Iād consider this Windows release an early milestone. A lot of work is being done in the directions of platform support and concurrency syntax now that there is source and ABI stability. You can build Linux server apps today, but support has only reached a few distros and the ecosystem is still small outside of Apple platforms.
I think there is a cultural challenge waiting too, since so far the Swift community has only really been engaged with the part of the broader dev community that was perhaps pro-Apple. Itās a great language, but its origin would color your first impressions.
I have nothing against Swift, it seems like a decent language.
In general Iām a little wary of things pushed by one big company. Rust was a little bit of an exception here because Mozilla had been doing open source for a long time.
But Iām simply not excited for Swift and that is on top of my fear the development will be strictly according to Appleās internal plans. From what I heard people are happy with for developing iOS apps, but that is simply a niche market and if you take away ObjC interop there arenāt many real benefits left for us outsiders.
If it helps, the Swift evolution process is public, and public proposals are how it works. That has been going on since the language was publicized in 2014. There are reasonable concerns that Apple will serve their own interests first, so I donāt blame anyone for their healthy skepticism.
The language is, however, intended to be general-purpose and useful for everything from applications down to systems-level work. Applications are where it began and is strongest. Server work and platform support are underway but not there yet, and systems level work is a later goal.
Objective-C interop is really not a star feature for anyone but us Apple devs, for whom it remains a requirement. I donāt think youāll be missing much by not having that part of the tooling on other platforms; it is really just a necessary feature to slowly migrate Appleās platforms off of ObjC.
What you can look forward to is a C-like language with an excellent type system, memory safety, performance, and stable syntax and ABI so new language versions donāt break your work. Iāll oversimplify it as being like Rust except you donāt have to mess with the borrow checker or lifetimes. (Until the systems-level work goes in, that is, and then ownership features are suggested to be opt-in.)
The reason Iām excited for Swift on Windows is that itās one more step into that general purpose domain and away from being useful only on Apple platforms. I want to use this language more of the time. Iāve been away from it for two years writing TypeScript and I canāt wait for Swift to serve broader purposes.
I think you should ask @pushcx (?) for an āApple Employeeā hat.
Thereās a form and usually alynpost handles them.
Ha, thank you but I didnāt mean that Iāve worked for Apple. I was a third party iOS developer for many years.
I wonder how much use itāll get, especially seeing as that example seemed to use its own Win32 bindings for UI. IBM didnāt really have much luck popularizing Swift on Linux servers (even going through the effort to port it to z).