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I’ve always wondered why Swift and Kotlin, which are two very similar languages of approximately the same age, have such widely different compiler stability. Kotlin feels quite solid and mature, while Swift sometimes just feels like one big hack. Considering the enormous resources Apple has compared to JetBrains, I find it strange their trajectories have been so very different.

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JetBrains business is all about understanding programming languages - Java in particular. And Kotlin is very, very close to Java.

With Kotlin, JetBrains was able to see what went wrong when previous JVM languages Scala and Apache Groovy each tried to be a better Java, and not repeat their mistakes, e.g. excessive operator overloading in Scala, or lack of scalability in Groovy.

Swift is one of the most complicated languages I have ever used, similar in complexity to C++. It’s also adding features relatively quickly. I think some of the earlier releases didn’t focus as much as they should have on stability, and that this technical debt is being repaid now.

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