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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

i know, it's just completely delusional.

Thinking that a programming language can thrive in a walled garden is insane. They've been burned by this in the past with objc, i don't understand how they can try again.

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This thread is either completely serious or completely sarcastic and I love the fact that I honestly can't tell which it is :)

I was quite serious :)) why do you think it's sarcastic ?

Swift is in considerably better shape than Obj-C is when it comes to cross platform. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least usable (there are production back ends written in Swift for example), it’s been slowly getting better, and Apple recently committed to filling many of the holes/inconsistencies in cross-platform with their announcement to rewrite Foundation in Swift and make it open source.

By contrast, Obj-C couldn’t even allocate memory without the assistance of AppKit, UIKit, or GNUStep. On its own it was woefully incomplete.

As for UI frameworks, porting SwiftUI would be a tall order with how it’s partially built on top of AppKit/UIKit. The most we’d probably get if it were open sourced is the surface bits, not the underpinnings.

Chris lattner had very clearly stated objectives for the language, and at some point cross-platform swift was a real possibility : at the time when a few server framework were created and when people at google were using it. Why this never lasted, i don’t know (my guess is the reason was purely political).

Unfortunately all those options got cancelled, and now apple remain on its own using it. I don’t believe in cross-platform swift anymore.

Apple’s business goals are for 1P and 3P apps to provide the best app+device experience on Apple hardware. Everything they to is to that end, since they make their money from selling hardware.

A programming language thriving is a secondary or tertiary goal.

Except the end-result of that policy is that 90% (made up number) of the app on the store are made with cross-platform tools, because very few can afford 1/ learning a language just for one platform 2/ not reusing any code at all between platforms.

I don’t think swift has any future in the long term unless they go multiplatform.

You're talking about a company that continues to support a crappy macro system named after themselves, first released 30 years go, that absolutely nobody else supports or cares about.

They just don't care. Apple will do what Apple will do.

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