Foundation is being rewritten in Swift, Swift has moved out from under apples GitHub and is pushing more cross platform tooling for windows and Linux.
It’s not as flexible in terms of targets yet as Rust, but it’s also not just locked to Apple platforms.
And for a big chunk of developers, that trade off is fine.
There is still no way to make gui applications outside of Apple devices. Unless you want to make your own library or generate/maintain Swift bindings for an existing UI library.
Maybe, it will be okay for console only programs or servers but why use that over Java/JVM, nodejs or go?
Doesn’t your comment apply very equally to Rust? There’s basically Slint and Tauri, and several bindings in various states of disarray. Not exactly very compelling.
The Rust ecosystem has very many strengths, but UI is not one of them.
Regardless, you’re incorrect about there being no way to make GUI applications
Here’s a Gnome binding https://swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/
The C++ interop allows easy binding to Qt https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative/tree/dev/tests/manual/he...
Win32 https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32
The fact that Swift has easier C++ interop than Rust makes the cross platform UI story much easier and more compelling than what I’ve found in Rust.
Bindings are much simpler to manage and can be handled by a single module map file with a single line in it most of the time.
Adding to that, many well established UI libraries depend on classes to implement them. Rusts lack of classes, while wonderful otherwise, makes binding to heavy class based libraries very onerous.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy rust. It’s just, it’s very ill suited for UI work today itself. I almost always write my UI side in C++ if I have to and bind over when needed instead.
I'm still not sold on the idea of managing bindings to C++ UI libraries. I'd rather have either the Swift organization or the UI library authors themselves write, maintain and document the bindings. Otherwise, it just seems like fighting against the ecosystem.
Vapor is the preferred framework and in general will seem familiar to anyone using any of the Rust server frameworks like actix web etc…
A tutorial for reference https://swift.org/getting-started/vapor-web-server/
From an ergonomics perspective, I write less code with Vapor than the equivalent Rust frameworks. It is slower today though but plenty for my needs, with some speed ups coming with Vapor refactors down the pipe.
I find that I need to spend less time managing shared resources with concurrency , and my code is clearer while being less verbose in general. Features like the trailing closure syntax are much easier to read for me.
I find it closer to how I’d write my Flask servers in the amount of code I need to do myself.