Of the opposite.. there’s soo much hate against Apple and all their contributions. But somehow Google, Meta, annd Microsoft are better represented.

Swift solves a problem that is still there. It was also released before the final release of Rust.

It’s just that people seem to think that because it’s from Apple, it’s only meant for iOS/macOS.

I love swift, it combines so many things, and Apple is really good get pushing the language forward with its compilers/warnings.

I’m also using it for shell scripts and small utils, and it’s really great. I made https://github.com/jrz/container-shell to improve the experience of scripting cli tools in Swift.

They deserve it. Look, Microsoft and Meta and Google are all evil companies too, but all of them actually make good-faith contributions to Open Source projects. Meta maintains React.js and Zstd, Microsoft does tons of open work on Typescript, VS Code and the Linux Kernel. Google handles the AOSP, Blink Engine, Go, Angular, JAX, Grpc... the list goes on. They're brimming with genuine, self-evident goodwill, even when their businesses detract from humanity.

So; what exactly are Apple's big, selfless contributions? XNU is Source Availible but unusable without buying proprietary Apple hardware. iBoot is mysterious and has to be reverse-engineered to use it like UEFI. Open standards like Vulkan are ignored for political reasons, CUPS is basically derelict, WebKit killed KHTML because sharing was too hard, and APFS and Metal are still both undocumented despite promised transparency. CoreML is proprietary but can't compete with CUDA, iPads can't use QEMU despite supporting it in-hardware, all the Apple Silicon DeviceTree code is private, competing runtimes like Corellium get sued and security researchers get ignored. Swift, as an offering to the Open Source community, is a punch line at the end of a 20 year long gag.

Apple does genuinely nothing to advance the wellbeing of common computing for mankind. Apple leaves behind no charitable contributions to anything that does not ensure their absolute preservation as a business. Combined with the proven anticompetitive damages that the App Store incurs on the burgeoning mobile market, they are unequivocally a net-negative force and aren't hated enough for their parasitic influence on global software production.

You make a convincing case.

And yet, they make the best damn computers out there with hardware second to none, make the single best consumer-level AI computer, are better at product design than basically anyone in the world, and have defined at least four different product categories, while donating billions of dollars to truly charitable causes and being more clearly committed to sustainability than any of their other large tech giants.

I think I can handle their stance on software,

Well, your first three claims are subjective and your second two claims are something both Meta, Microsoft and Google have all done themselves. I was focusing more on what made Apple unique, not why people want to exonerate them so desperately. Your could use the same defense to protect Facebook and nobody could objectively disprove you.

Cause like... we could start judging companies based on how many carbon credits they buy. But that wouldn't make Microsoft or Apple or Google any less evil, so it's a non-sequitur. Apple can simultaneously mass-produce the most desirable hardware in the world while creating anticompetitive market conditions that debilitates fair choice and destroys legitimate value. The United States threatened to break up Microsoft for the same overreach.

I'm fairness, when Swift was first released it was basically Apple devices only. It took forever for Foundation to get ported to other platforms (and good luck writing anything useful without Foundation).

Yes this exactly. People are also conveniently ignoring or forgetting that Apple kept changing the ABI for Swift binaries - it wasn't until 'v5' did they lock it down. Objective-C is 30+ years old and only once had this issue with the ObjC 2.0 release. Really, Swift v5 was the real v1.0 release because it was at that version Swift was truly ready for primetime.

When C#/.NET was first released it was basically Windows devices only, too. First release: 2000, cross-platform and opened up in 2014, if I’m reading Wikipedia correctly.

When Android was first released it was basically Android devices only, too. Still is.

Lots of folks are looking for a sweet spot that combines most of Rust's upsides with a less restrictive model. I'm working on a game in Swift (using Godot bindings) for that reason.

I don't feel C# is that Microsoft-centric anymore - not after the release of Roslyn.

It works well on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and I suspect Linux as well (but I never use Linux, hence I can't be sure). And if you want a multiplatform UI there's some decent options like Avalonia UI [0].

---

[0]: https://avaloniaui.net/

When Microsoft ported C# to Linux, they actually held off on releasing it because Linux ran C# applications better than Windows OS. They took time to refactor the code so Windows OS and Linux where on par. I cannot remember the source video where Microsoft employees talking about it is. The video was right after the .NET Core initial release.

That being said. Microsoft does not want a cross-platform C# that works on Linux. This is why their .NET MAUI does not support Linux and a 3rd party framework will be needed.

Only reason I would choose C# for non-Windows is because of existing / legacy code base. Any new application would use language and libraries that fit the problem versus trying to fit C# as the solution to all.

Mono actually is the primary project that greatly improved the C# world and evolved the latest .NET infrastructure, not Microsoft. Mono developers actually cleaner APIs. Even Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac is just Mono Developer with the Linux supporting bits removed.

I think the evolution of C# beyond Microsoft is overplayed. The entire tooling around the language remains a Microsoft product, with all the attendant Microsoft nonsense. It has opt out telemetry, even on Linux, and like every other MS product is currently having AI force-fed down its throat. It's only a matter of time until a compiler update automatically uploads all your code to Microsoft Azure Recall .net Passport Hotmail ft. the Copilot dancers.

If you're developing Windows apps or Windows games, C# is a fine choice; much as Swift is a fine choice for Apple apps. But no one worried about Apple's control of Swift should be pointing people to C# with a straight face.

Microsft management cleary doesn't want VSCode to have feature parity with VS, and C# DevKit is also under the same license as VS Professional.

This routinely pulls the carpet under the .NET team effort to widespread .NET adoption.

Is it that Apple made it and puts resources into it that makes it Apple-centric? If so, is that truly important?

I wonder why LLVM isn’t also considered Apple-centric by the same thought process.

To be fair, LLVM wasn't an Apple-initiated project, but one Apple noticed and decided to adopt later on (they hired Chris Latner in 2005; LLVM began in 2000, and had its first public stable release in 2003).

Unlike Swift, there was never a period of time where LLVM only worked exclusively on Apples own OS's or hardware. From the get go, you could run early versions of LLVM on Windows. In Swift's case, Linux support came in 2016, 1.5 years after Swift's initial release in 2014, then Windows support came 6 years later in v5 (2020).

If Apple didn't want to let Swift suffer the reputation of being an Apple-only language they should've invested more into cross platform support much earlier on. Yes, today Apple and everyone else can say, 'Swift is cross-platform', but dig deeper into the history of Swift and its clear that from the get go, Apple treated non-Apple OS support as an afterthought.

It's not that Apple puts resources into it. It's that, yes, Apple made it, and its only raison d'etre is to replace Objective-C for Apple platforms.