I'm glad that this is happening in the open, lots of smart people are working on it and sharing their insights, design decisions and code.
I'm glad that this is happening in the open, lots of smart people are working on it and sharing their insights, design decisions and code.
That has always been Swift's main goal it is even stated on both sites.
> Swift is intended as a replacement for C-based languages (C, C++, and Objective-C).
-- https://www.swift.org/about/
> Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics, giving Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers the performance and power they demand.
-- https://developer.apple.com/swift/
So no wonder why they are doing this.
I wonder if some day we will see a platform ship with an obvious system language and an obvious application language. Right now everyone seem to want to do everything at the same time, and I'm not sure if it's the best approach.
It's also always very interesting to see how programming languages evolve. If I don't change industries, I still have at least 30 years to spend in this one. 30 years ago Java, Ruby and JavaScript didn't even exist, but something like ML was already 18 years old, and records, sum types and pattern matching are just landing in Java/C#. So there's a lot to learn by studying history, and what's happening right now is part of it. I've also followed Go's generics, OCaml multicore, Java's Loom, Valhalla and Amber, and each time it was intersting and insightful. Our industry is all about tradeoffs between change and stability, and those projects are an example of that.