121–130 of 300 posts
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Miguel was not a MS employee. He did parlay Xamarin into an acqui-hire though and is now a softie.
Miguel has long left Microsoft and nowadays focus on Apple ecosystem, and Godot. He also voiced back on twitter his disapproval on how Xamarin.Forms became MAUI.
> With this release, SwiftPM now has the opportunity to offer a unified build execution engine across all platforms.
this is what the big deal is. it might not achieve much on its own immediately, but this is the key to build a truly multiplatform ecosystem of libraries, tools and applications in Swift. we should expect to see more of that soon.
I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem. Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the…
Frankly, it makes me feel bad for Chris Lattner. This guy's been worked his ass off to create a genuinely new language with all the bells and whistles he can fit, and his employer is the one that held him back the most. It took years for Foundation framework to get serious multiplatform commitment, and unless something changes drastically I think that's going to be the sour taste that developers have in their mouths.…
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Microsoft had a research version of the CLR called Rotor (2002) that predated Mono (2004). Rotor built for Windows, FreeBSD, and macOs, albeit with a not-very-open license. When Mono came along, the internal position at Microsoft was surprisingly positive. There was a dev slide deck that went into Mono in some depth. And a telling slide that said it wasn't a threat because the performance wasn't competitive at the ti…
Rotor was BSD licensed, so I suppose if that’s your definition of a not very open license…
We could go back and check on Codeplex… oh wait.
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This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have mor…
> why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms. Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Pytho…
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.
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This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have mor…
Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.
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I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."
> anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" Ehhh, I don't know, whoever's designing and implementing Swift and Xcode etc clearly genuinely care on a personal level about quality. I get that there's going to be taste involved but the amount of thought and effort that's gone into the ecosystem is very high.
Updates tied to OS and crashes more than it should.
I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem. Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the…
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 n…
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#.
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I disagree vehemently. For any active language, distro packages should be at most 3 years old. And for any language that's stable enough to be worth using, "3 years old" is good enough.
Both GCC and Clang have shipped support for major updates to C and C++ within the last 3 years. If C and C++ aren't stable enough, what is?
I lived through the C++11 transition (which was the only actually significant improvement C++ has ever had), and as much as GCC 4.6 was enticing, it really wasn't a burden to keep supporting GCC 4.4 in stable software. Only for ground-breaking development (which takes long enough to stabilize that stable distros will have the new GCC) is it worth starting to use the new features unconditionally.
Now, C++ does have a much better source-level compatibility story than most languages (e.g. `#if ... #define constexpr /* compiler too old */`), but that just means that newer languages have no excuse for refusing to learn from its successes.
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And until packages are actually shipped for all mainstream distros, the stigma is completely accurate. No, neither "just install a tarball" nor "just install this docker image" count.
Go has been shipping for more than a decade as a .tgz and does not have this stigma at all ... Anyway, you probably missed the following https://www.swift.org/install/linux/ I see packages for all major distros there. But people will probably mention some distro not listed and say the mainstream distro support is a farce. For some reason people have set the bar for Swift incredibly unrealistically high and there will…
That's not what I call "actually usable on non-Apple systems".