This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.
And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.
Amazing that you comment that on an announcement that is one large effort of many that Apple have been doing to build an open-source ecosystem over many years...
> This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.
A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.
I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps).
Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE.
C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong type safety, etc. All the things you need to build out the logic of business applications. And it's fully open source.
I have looked at Swift. By comparison, the tooling is 10 years behind and the performance is not even close. I struggle to see what Swift brings to the table over C#.
If you want to use Visual Studio Code the 'DevKit' extension which provides essential features (language server) is proprietary and requires a Visual Studio licence regardless of platform.
Also I find since C# is an 'enterprise' language developers take the p--s in what they want to charge for, as enterprise will pay as a 'cost of doing business'. Recently FluentAssertions, a freakin test assertion library decided they wanted to charge for newer versions. You don't get that in other languages like Python/Ruby etc.
The language server is part of the SDK itself. The language server integration, debugger and all the features that make VS Code a good tool to write C# in are a part of base C# extension which is MIT-licensed and has no commercial restrictions whatsoever.
The only "wart" is that "vsdbg" - debugger it ships with is closed-source because it is essentially the same debugger as in Visual Studio but extracted into a standalone cross-platform component. There is an open alternative "NetCoreDbg" used by the extension fork for VSCodium (and various DAP bridges to Neovim, Emacs, etc.).
I used C# on .NET framework (the old .NET running only on Windows) 10 years ago at work. Then I had to use it 2 years ago again, and man, did it change! ASP.NET Minimal API is absolutely awesome, as the Generic Host integrating config, logging and DI is a great too. A very mature and complete framework.
It brings everything to the table a great modern language and ecosystem needs. Even null safety.
Regarding error handling, I don't have a strong opinion yet. I think Rust has nailed it, but C# (with unchecked exceptions) didn't create any issues in the projects I worked on.
Because not having hundreds of keywords means that either you have some parts of the language that are "this has a special meaning please don't touch" (double underscores are good enough, right guys?) or "we reassigned 10 different things to the same keyword to keep the number low" (ahem, static).
I’ve spent some time looking into swift as well and was quite pleased with the overall language, it really contained some really good ideas. This makes it a bit of a shame that it is tied so closely to Apple
And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.