Swift is a really great language and I'm very bullish on it becoming popular for server-side projects in the next few years, once they improve a few things (namely performance gotchas and concurrency).
I see two kinds of programming languages in the world. There are a couple which were designed with a great concurrency model from the start, and there are all the rest which weren’t. In these, concurrency remains awkward at best, and seriously problematic at worst.
I have never seen any programming language retcon a good concurrency model onto version 6. The actor proposal I’ve seen looks horrendously complex.
I try to be open minded about something I haven’t used yet but I really don’t think this is something you can just bolt on.
I do agree with your point, however, I think Swift is in a unique situation since they intentionally deferred on making concurrency first-class. Now the language is in a much better position to implement a modern system.
What about the proposal is horrendously complex? The target audience is meant to be language designers, not the average developer. The actual suggested API changes looked to be a few added keywords and some new classes/protocols to use.
One of the most important things they should fix ASAP, IMHO, is how cumbersome it is to install and get up and running on Linux in general, it totally needs something like Rust's rustup before or first party support from major distros before I can recommend it to anyone.
