I feel like Swift could be such a great language if it was only given the proper care and feeding of open source. Instead it's largely locked in the apple walled garden with tokens given to the outside.
> it's largely locked in the apple walled garden with tokens given to the outside
So, the compiler, stdlib and runtime, core libraries, build system ... not enough? What else would you want?
I feel the problem is not what's in open source, but that the open-source community cannot really form, since no outsider can significantly change what the Apple contributors decide. Some of the peripheral projects have relatively free rein, but they can't compete e.g., with server libraries elsewhere.
Also, the Apple people have to track what Apple needs, so they'll put out stuff per schedule that works for them but falls apart on untested code paths. And they don't really deprecate stuff, so you end up with multiple ways to do the same thing. And there seems to be no budget for documentation, which is quite far behind esp. for concurrent programming. And so it goes.
We'll see where they get with ownership and inter-op with C/C++/Java. Concurrency + ownership + legacy + FFI inter-op => combinatoric complexity...
> So, the compiler, stdlib and runtime, core libraries, build system ... not enough? What else would you want?
First class IDE support (Xcode is not that). Better documentation. The build system only half works. Better packaging. I can keep going.
The swift ecosystem often feels like just enough was done to lock in iOS devs (but not enough to actually provide a good developer experience) and then they stopped because Apple has no incentive to do more than that.
> I feel the problem is not what's in open source, but that the open-source community cannot really form, since no outsider can significantly change what the Apple contributors decide. Some of the peripheral projects have relatively free rein, but they can't compete e.g., with server libraries elsewhere.
So you agree. This is exactly the point I was making.
The weird open stache {} brackets that are permitted when the last argument of a function is a closure. This is a ridiculous feature, combined with ResultBuilder, made the language worse. And I will assert that both of these awful features increased complexity for the sole purpose of making SwiftUI syntax approachable to JavaScript devs.
On the other hand, I hate react-native and prefer to not live in a world where all my software is glitchy and slow, so I understand Apple’s motivations. React-native is a threat with hip modern syntax. Apple still used the icky MVC with the crusty old CALayers.
- async coloring every function
- actors coloring every function and type
- everything is now in tasks
- sendable/non-sendable closure especially when integrating with legacy code
You write any piece of code that touches async and you have to add 4 additional keywords
