In reading comments about Swift on this and other HN threads I see a lot opinions that in my experience are completely off the mark: a) "Apple cares only about iOS so thats all Swift will be used for" b) "Swift is in fact slow, look at this (naive) swift code vs. this (heavily optimized) c/c++ code".

While for people who take time to really work with Swift (yes those are often iOS and Mac developers by necessity) come away with an opinion that Swift is really a diamond in the rough, a new generation of a language co-evolving along with Kotlin and Rust. One distinction is that Apple can afford to hire top-tier compiler developers (including the founder of Rust) and invest heavily in tooling and growing the Swift ecosystem. They can pull off projects like ABI stability which took more than a year of focus for the whole team.

I point this out because the is always some sort of opportunity where widespread public perception is so mismatched against reality. I predict in the future there will be some tech startup that will go all in on the Swift ecosystem and be able to run circles around the competition.

Note for responders: I'm not saying the languages aren't just as good, or better. I'm not excusing the fact that Apple definitely dictates the priority of where the compiler team invests their time.