As much as I actually do enjoy working with Swift (real type classes!!), there are some parts that are a big WTF.
This is exactly what the new async/await feature solves though. Actors are built on top of that.
They weren’t under any pressure at all to have any other ‘async’ story early on and so intentionally chose to focus on other fundamentals and take their time to build something that would be well designed and additive.
The early versions of Swift didn't even have a standard Result type, IIRC.
So even today, you will see some Swift functions that have `throws` in the signature and some that return `Result<T>`.
It was always awkward.
I agree that they are not idiomatic, which is the point I’m making.
There was a perfectly working solution that had no barriers to its use with swift, so it made sense not to rush the replacement.
Maybe it was the right call in the end (I'm of the opinion that it literally doesn't matter. Apple could ask us to develop in COBOL or even something as crazy as Objective-C and we'd all still do it), but I still think it's fair to say it was weird/surprising to have awkward/difficult async tools for an official mobile OS language.
I guess in relation to your original statement, I am refuting it.
They had a strong solution which was pretty easy to use, and as good as the language they were replacing, and well integrated with the platform.
The idea that they ‘didn’t have a strong solution’ doesn’t really hold from my point of view.
It was strong, and working which gave them the luxury of time to develop an idiomatic solution as the language matured.
If there really hadn’t been a strong solution in place, I would have agreed with you.
It is frustrating, but it seems like they are finally getting there. It’s frustrating since a language like Go had a good concurrency model almost from the start. But Go had different constraints and arguably has less surface area to cover.
Go is twice as old (since initial public release) and still doesn't have decent support for generalized algorithms, for example. They have struggled just as long to come up with a more usable error model.