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Swift 5: start your engines

lists.swift.org

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Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#2
I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#3
Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3?

In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't break code.

I just don't get breaking the language so often. Do people enjoy rewriting code?

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#5
post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

> Do people enjoy rewriting code?

No, of course not. The way I see it, Swift is scared to go the "Java" route where backwards compatibility is valued above all else, leaving the language an antiquated mess.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#6
post #2

I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

I've been sort of going back and forth on what I want to work on as a side project, but server side Swift stuff is definitely an option. I love the language, and think it could end up being a really strong competitor in that space. At the moment it's just barely viable though, sadly.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#7
Swift developers, how is the evolution of the programming language now? does it still have backwards compatibility issues or things are more stable now (and will be with this new proposals)?

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#8
post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

Xcode has a migration plugin that's not too bad. The biggest changes are generally for the better so I'm like meh. It's kinda annoying if you have dependencies but maintained dependencies generally migrate very quickly.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#9
post #2

I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

You should definitely try rust, it's better than its counterparts, rapidly growing, memory safe language with utmost priority on efficiency. Plus its cross-platform too :)

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#10
post #7

Swift developers, how is the evolution of the programming language now? does it still have backwards compatibility issues or things are more stable now (and will be with this new proposals)?

The Swift 3->4 migration was not bad, actually–just a couple of small changes to source here and there. With ABI stability I think we'll see the adoption of Swift for libraries and frameworks increase significantly.
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