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Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

I want to try swift but the fact that there is no windows support is a deal killer for me. And it perplexes me how over the years there have been no serious attempts to make it happen. Is it just a cult of Apple + Linux masterrace thing?

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I 100% agree that lacking windows support is a dealbreaker for many.

I actually cared a lot about the ideas of swift and wanted to (try to) contribute in some way. But without any Windows support AND lacking tools for linux+WSL it's really hard to stay motivated.

Here is what Chris Lattner said in mid 2018:

> I think that first class support for Windows is a critical thing, and I doubt anyone in the Swift community would object to it. The problem is that we need to find someone who wants it badly enough and has the resources/know-how to make it happen.

I think the root of the problem. First class windows support is a too complex task for the community and should have been initiated by Apple/Microsoft.

This is what I admire Golang and Rust. They focused on developer support early on and as a result they are (currently) more usable.

My initial reaction is that neither Apple or Microsoft have incentive to get Swift going well on Windows. It will open Windows developers to the language used to build apps on a competing platform, which could steer them towards Apple. And vice versa, it would allow Apple developers to start thinking more about writing Windows app, and possibly steer them away from the Apple platform, or at least dilute their time on it.

Windows is nonexistence as mobile OS ,and people deploying windows server are probably already entrenched in using .Net technologies anyway.

Provided that you can still install linux on any computer to develop on, i don't see a real market for swift on windows.

It's a good thing Microsoft doesn't think that way. It apparently has metrics that show desktop development is not stagnating, but rising thanks in part to Windows desktop OS usage also rising [1]. See its plans for WinUI v3 [2]. WinUI is not cross-platform but it is talking about it.

[1] Comments from Ryan at MS https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1660

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

Windows exists as mobile OS.

It runs on the tablets, hybrid laptops and lots of custom made handeld.

It is the option to go to for anyone not willing or able to acquire an iPad, given the bad experience of large majority of Android tablets.

There are Windows technologies not available on OS X or Linux, is that Windows masterrace thing?

If there is no support for Windows it may indicate there was little demand for that. The biggest domain for Swift is still Apple OSes (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS) and some attempts to use it on the server side. Swift is open source, if someone wants to make it happen on Windows, they are Welcome. I do not see the reason why anyone at Apple or anyone working on Linux would bother to do that.

There are people (not from Apple) working on this.

> I want to try swift but the fact that there is no windows support is a deal killer for me.

There’s no official support, at least not yet. But it’s in the tree.

> And it perplexes me how over the years there have been no serious attempts to make it happen.

https://github.com/apple/swift/search?q=windows&unscoped_q=w...

If it's a real language, it's got to work on Windows. Having written a lot of portable code in C on both Unix and Windows, I can say that the reason I fell in love with Golang and Rust was because they had out of the box Windows support.

deal un-killed I guess: https://dev.azure.com/compnerd/windows-swift

playground: https://github.com/save-buffer/swift-repl

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