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FWIW I’d really like to see Swift available in more platforms. At the moment only MacOS and Ubuntu seem to be supported (*BSD and perhaps Windows would be very welcome)
* Disclaimer: I’m the packager for swift on those platforms.
Just look at the kinds of discussions that e.g. Ian Partridge has contributed to: https://forums.swift.org/u/ianpartridge/summary
It includes substantial work on Docker images, logging, crash debugging, etc.
Maybe google will become a bit more invested in the Swift on Linux side of things, but so far I haven't really seen them invest in the ecosystem (besides pushing differentiable programming, which is cool, but it's mostly satisfying a niche requirement).
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As an Apple fan and a programming language nerd, I have basically no interest in ever using the language. I spend a lot of time in C++, Haskell, Rust, and Kubernetes, but Swift just feels pointlessly complicated to me. (C++ I think is also pointlessly complicated, but the rest at least have a point ;-)
Swift is no more complicated than Haskell or Rust.
Swift's complexity feels much less compositional. There are still a lot of situations where I won't really know how certain features interact (especially when it comes to generics, associated types, etc.). Also, the documentation on some edge-cases is basically non-existant.
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Prediction: React Native will be dead in 3 years.
Why? It's already been around for 5 years and has certainly grown in popularity.
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Except last time i checked, flutter for web renders everything in a 2D canvas, which for some reasons doesn’t feel that great.
Would you care to educate me on why that is bad thing? (I'm a Jr web dev, it's not that obvious to me, although I suspect such a 'graphics-first' approach on the web leads to difficulties with resizing, responsive design, etc?)
Also, integrating with other js components will likely be impossible as well ( try to integrate the google maps js component into your layout... good luck)
And browsers update way way more often than mobile os.
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Why? It's already been around for 5 years and has certainly grown in popularity.
Frankly, it's awful. Measuring performance apples to apples, React Native is nearly strictly slower than a web application on mobile. As PWAs gain feature parity, I think there will be little to no point to React Native. Because of a lack of JIT capabilities, React Native JS just can't run nearly as fast as React on the web for example. That, coupled with bad architecture. Too much is deferred - you have deferred bat…
> Because of a lack of JIT capabilities There's the new Hermes engine which should speed things up
The main reason React Native will stick around is that it lets React developers more easily transition to native, and there's a ton of React developers.
FWIW I’d really like to see Swift available in more platforms. At the moment only MacOS and Ubuntu seem to be supported (*BSD and perhaps Windows would be very welcome)
Swift is also available on Fedora/RedHat/Centos 8; simply type “dnf install swift-lang” * Disclaimer: I’m the packager for swift on those platforms.
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Frankly, it's awful. Measuring performance apples to apples, React Native is nearly strictly slower than a web application on mobile. As PWAs gain feature parity, I think there will be little to no point to React Native. Because of a lack of JIT capabilities, React Native JS just can't run nearly as fast as React on the web for example. That, coupled with bad architecture. Too much is deferred - you have deferred bat…
> As PWAs gain feature parity, I think there will be little to no point to React Native I absolutely agree, but it'll take Apple more than a few years to be willing to make iPhones have native app/PWA feature parity. > Because of a lack of JIT capabilities There's the new Hermes engine which should speed things up The main reason React Native will stick around is that it lets React developers more easily transition t…
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The creator of Swift (and LLVM), Chris Lattner now works for Google. There’s already an experimental version of Tensorflow[1] for Swift. I personally believe that Swift will really shine in differentiable programming and thus machine learning. A little over a decade ago, most of the machine learning community was using either Matlab (and it’s open source clone Octave) or R. It took a long time for the machine learnin…
Julia is better suited for differentiable programming and machine learning. Something like frontend/scripting with Julia, and computing cores with Rust, as an alternative to the ubiquitous Python + C/C++ stack. And there are already more or less established frameworks for Julia: - FluxML[1] for machine learning - Zygote[2] for differentiable programming - Turing[3] for probabilistic programming - Rich support for GPU…
Guessing the opposite rarely happens.
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They examined both Julia and Rust, among others, before deciding to move forward with Swift for Tensorflow. https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/WhySwif...
Chris Lattner is leading the project, of course they're using the language he designed. Personally I think they substantially underestimated the difficulty of setting up a full technical computing ecosystem in Swift relative to Julia. But, fair enough, if I'd designed Swift I'd probably be dogfooding it too. Some previous discussions that mention the swift-vs-Julia decision: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1…
Either way, Swift's functional design around a type system has some compiler implications towards solving larger problems that Julia probably will struggle with as it moves forward beyond the goal of just being a faster Python.