Chalk one up for time wasted not addressing what people really need...
I truly love Swift, like god-damn is it my cup of tea, but I can't really bring myself to write it anymore. I've written over 10,000+ lines , shipped and maintained a few different production apps, but anymore I just have no urge to write it.
And the biggest reason why? I think it being open source is a joke until Apple, and I mean Apple themselves, implements some sort of cross-platform UI framework with it. Like, most of what is written in Swift is fucking UI code that's totally useless on other platforms.
I think it's pretty laughable I can run Swift on AWS but I can't do a simple GUI app on Linux or Windows using the OOB Swift SDK. Apple, you're a fucking trillion dollar organization, for fucks sake stop being so damn stingy with portability.
When I can write cross-platform GUI apps with Swift, maybe I'll give a fuck 'bout running it on a server. Just my two very bitter, hurt, and sad two cents...
A good, modern, general purpose cross-platform GUI application framework is a very different proposition than server-side Swift. It’s also a very, very tall order that would require a lot of resources to create and a lot more to maintain... and I don’t see big strategic benefits to Apple in doing so.
I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Maybe WASM will lead to browser-side Swift and then you can do Electron-style cross platform apps using web technologies. (Not that I think Apple would put resources to that either.)
> Chalk one up for time wasted not addressing what people really need...
As a Swift programmer, I find this particular project to be useless. I can't imagine why I ever would want to do this. But: they make it clear that it was a community effort, and even singled out the non-Apple-employee who did the legwork to make it happen.
At the end of the announcement, they reiterated that the source code and process are both open, and provided links to the Swift forums and issue tracker, and called for more people to get involved.
I agree that Apple doesn't seem to be improving Swift in the ways I want it improved, but this is not a good example of that. This is the story of someone (not at Apple or Amazon) who saw something they wanted to do (use Apple's tools with Amazon's services), and made it happen. Good for Fabian! I'm not going to criticize Apple for offering some help and writing a blog post about it.
I just don’t think that’s where Apple’s priorities are for swift. They want a modern language for their platform first and foremost, and then secondly if they developers can write server components for their apps in Swift, then that’s good as well.
I wonder if they're hoping people that choose Swift as their first programming language will experience "vendor lock-in" and will be disinclined from branching out to other platforms that don't support Swift. This would make sense given the Swift Playgrounds initiative.
Microsoft ignored the same exact point (official multiple UI) for C# for years, despite having it at some point (Silverlight out of browser). So I can totally understand what you are expressing there, yet I think there are even less chance Apple act on and provide such framework in the future.
I am quite on your side, except for one thing : i don’t really care about UI code anymore, because i think those have to be done using native components and framework for better OS integration and performance.
what i would LOVE however is a way to share business logic code and network code coded in swift between ios and android easily. I believe it should be straightforward using android ndk and clang, but for some reason i have never seen someone successfully implement it.
And of course, being able to call this same code from an electron app on windows would be a great thing..
> I truly love Swift, like god-damn is it my cup of tea
I also feel similarily strongly about the language itself, I find myself really productive in it. But for the kind of work I do I do need more portability that what it currently offers. I have my eye on Rust but it looks just a little too low level for what I want, general purpose-do everything language, focus on saftey, reasonable performance.
I truly love Swift, like god-damn is it my cup of tea, but I can't really bring myself to write it anymore. I've written over 10,000+ lines , shipped and maintained a few different production apps, but anymore I just have no urge to write it.
And the biggest reason why? I think it being open source is a joke until Apple, and I mean Apple themselves, implements some sort of cross-platform UI framework with it. Like, most of what is written in Swift is fucking UI code that's totally useless on other platforms.
I think it's pretty laughable I can run Swift on AWS but I can't do a simple GUI app on Linux or Windows using the OOB Swift SDK. Apple, you're a fucking trillion dollar organization, for fucks sake stop being so damn stingy with portability.
When I can write cross-platform GUI apps with Swift, maybe I'll give a fuck 'bout running it on a server. Just my two very bitter, hurt, and sad two cents...