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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s own marketing speak has Swift as a cross platform language. Just like, I suppose, C# is a cross platform language.

Apple puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.

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Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage.

But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.

A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.

You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.

Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.

I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.

Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".

And if you mean before the whole .NET Core rewrite, many big corp server applications were already written in .NET, products like SharePoint, Sitecore, Optimizely, Dynamics 365, Four51,.... and plenty of server infrastructure for XBox and Windows games.

Was it Apple, or community driven projects?

> Just like, I suppose, C#

Have you actually used .NET on Linux/macOS? I have (both at home and work) and there isn't anything that made me think it was neglected on those platforms. Everything just works™

It didn't use to be that way, for a very long time.

It's been 10 years of it running on Linux.

People here need time to notice XD

When it wasn't that way, they never had any marketing speak that suggested that though?

What didn't work and when?

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