Hacker News Reader

That con is a pretty big one. Macs have less than 10% desktop market share.

In this case Swift is being used on the server, so that could be an officially supported platform[0] which if I recall correctly is macOS, Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux 2, and Windows as of Swift 5.3.

Swift on Linux is pretty much WIP, with an ecosystem that is Mac first and hardly considers another platforms.

On Windows with luck 5.3 will be the first version that the compiler actually works, let alone existing libraries that barely work on Linux.

Why does this matter? It’s a server, not a desktop application.

> you're bound to Xcode (and therefore macOS) for development

I would prefer languages that don't dictate what hardware/software to use for writing them.

I get that, but it still doesn't explain why the above poster used the MacOS market share as a detractor in this case. If you value languages that don't dictate hardware/software for you, then Apple was probably never a serious contender for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com