There's no reason to use Swift outside of the Apple platform. Rust is much better option and more cross-platform. And they work hard on reducing the binary size as well.
This is like a C++ dev saying there’s no reason to use rust.
Swift offers a lot of ergonomic values over rust in ways that have made me switch over as my default choice.
Things like default argument values, lazy static initializers, computed properties, optional chaining. I’ve personally also come around to ref counting by default being a sensible choice for most programs.
Though the thing that won me over was the recent C++ interoperability. Rust doesn’t have a good story there yet that’s as comparable. Hours/days/months writing Rust bindings for a C++ library are often minutes in Swift.
Each language has its own place and own benefits, but to say there’s “no reason to use a language” feels short sighted and defensively dismissive
I would agree with you but in the case of Swift is largely confined to the Apple ecosystem with other platforms as an afterthought, while both C++ and Rust try to cover as many targets as possible.
It remains to be seen weather Swift will break out of being just a language for programming Apple applications.
There is still no way to make gui applications outside of Apple devices. Unless you want to make your own library or generate/maintain Swift bindings for an existing UI library.
Maybe, it will be okay for console only programs or servers but why use that over Java/JVM, nodejs or go?
UI libraries are a poor reason to pick Rust over Swift, given that Rust has a very poor UI story.
Doesn’t your comment apply very equally to Rust? There’s basically Slint and Tauri, and several bindings in various states of disarray. Not exactly very compelling.
The Rust ecosystem has very many strengths, but UI is not one of them.
Regardless, you’re incorrect about there being no way to make GUI applications
The fact that Swift has easier C++ interop than Rust makes the cross platform UI story much easier and more compelling than what I’ve found in Rust.
Bindings are much simpler to manage and can be handled by a single module map file with a single line in it most of the time.
Adding to that, many well established UI libraries depend on classes to implement them. Rusts lack of classes, while wonderful otherwise, makes binding to heavy class based libraries very onerous.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy rust. It’s just, it’s very ill suited for UI work today itself. I almost always write my UI side in C++ if I have to and bind over when needed instead.
My comment wasn't about comparing it to Rust at all. Adwaita for Swift sounds good an all but it still looks immature. Also, the win32 bindings look even more immature. I agree UI is not there yet for Rust and from what I see it's even worse for Swift (unless we're taking about Apple devices).
I'm still not sold on the idea of managing bindings to C++ UI libraries. I'd rather have either the Swift organization or the UI library authors themselves write, maintain and document the bindings. Otherwise, it just seems like fighting against the ecosystem.
From an ergonomics perspective, I write less code with Vapor than the equivalent Rust frameworks. It is slower today though but plenty for my needs, with some speed ups coming with Vapor refactors down the pipe.
I find that I need to spend less time managing shared resources with concurrency , and my code is clearer while being less verbose in general. Features like the trailing closure syntax are much easier to read for me.
I find it closer to how I’d write my Flask servers in the amount of code I need to do myself.
It really isn’t though. All my iOS swift code that doesn’t touch UIKit has been running unit tests with Linux Debian on GitHub actions for a few years now with almost no extra effort.
Any api or data model code, pretty much 80% of my app code works crosss platform
Wish Swift provided a way to use custom allocators. Then it would be really terrific. A fair number of middle-ware projects work well with strategies like arena allocation which significantly improve performance and also structural ergonomics. ARC adds a fair bit of performance burden - you can see dozens of examples of people refactoring continuously to reduce ARC time in the swift forums.
The last time I used it (and I admit this was a couple years ago), silly expectations like “my program will behave the same on Linux as it does on Mac” were not being met.
Well I for one appreciate Swift’s focus on ergonomics and progressive disclosure. I think Rust is great, but I don’t see it as a great application-level programming language.
I think it’s wonderful that Swift is trying to be more cross-platform. No need to shoot down the efforts of people trying to bring a language they like to more places.
