hocuspocus

It certainly doesn't help, but among big tech, Apple is not the only company where teams are siloed and independent. Microsoft has people writing Java or Go instead of C# too.

I assume the server side usage is not zero, but not enough to reach a critical mass, you're probably right there.

After that, and IBM losing interest, Apple did hire a few competent people (including contributors to Netty and Akka) to build the Swift Server Workgroup.

But I don't know why I'd pick Swift on the server when Rust is better in almost every dimension, with a thriving and more community-driven ecosystem.

So what's the issue then? You'd be able to bring other teams to current versions of Java and frameworks, which have all been using virtual threads for the past 3 years.

> Java 21 was just released and frameworks had no meaningful support for virtual threads whatsoever.

Spring was ready on day 1, as virtual threads had been an experimental feature since Java 19. Spring Boot added support within a couple months.

> In my experience, most companies using Java are chronically multiple versions behind (e.g. some of my friends still in the Java world are on 11).

And that's on you.

Java LSP backends are basically headless Eclipse and NetBeans, they definitely go beyond syntactical errors.

There's also the upcoming Metals v2 that's using another compiler frontend optimized for performance, Google Turbine: https://metals-lsp.org

Actionable diagnostics for Java aren't implemented yet though.

Voting is definitely not a small domain in a direct democracy, and many Swiss citizens abroad don't receive paper ballots early enough to mail them back in time.

We vote 4 times a year and it's not always easy for Swiss citizens abroad to receive and mail ballots back in time.

You can run Scala on Android and it's been done but it never worked well nor was given priority. Which is understandable as the commercial entities behind Scala already struggle to build the ecosystem and tooling in spaces where the language shines.

For instance the Android runtime has chronically lagged behind mainline JVM bytecode versions, iirc once Scala started to emit Java 8 bytecode, Android was stuck on Java 6.

Kotlin had other obvious advantages on Android like its thin standard library or the inlining of higher-order functions.

Not to the same extent. Scala.JS and Kotlin.JS are somewhat comparable, other targets not so much. There was no serious attempt at making Scala target mobile devices, even during the window of opportunity with Scala on Android.

> But somehow Kotlin managed to stay "not too complex", unlike Scala.

It's not really true anymore, Kotlin has slowly absorbed most of the same features and ideas even though they're sometimes pretty half-baked, and it's even less principled than the current Scala ecosystem. JetBrains also wants to make Kotlin target every platform under the sun.

At this point, the only notable difference are HKTs and Scala's metaprogramming abilities. Kotlin stuck to a compiler plugin exposing a standard interface (kotlinx.serialization) for compile-time codegen. Scala can do things like deriving an HTTP client from an OpenAPI specification on the fly, by the LSP backend.

I work at a tech-adjacent company with no middle management and no, it sucks even more. The work doesn't disappear, it simply gets divided and spread out over a lot more people, many of those with no real executive power. I don't even think this saves my employer any money in the long run.

Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.

The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.

My mom has had several generations of Galaxy A5x and basic iPads, it makes absolutely no difference. She simply never installs any app.

Some things are actually worse on the iOS side. It took years for Apple to catch up with spam and scam calls/SMS detection.

Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams, I eventually set up NextDNS on her devices.

And who defines legitimate? The same lunatics who regularly shit on international laws?

It's not like Western(-ish) nations have much of a choice here. As soon as your banks and financial system depend on the USD in any way, it comes with a mandatory dose of US imperialism and extraterritorial jurisdiction.

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.

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.

Vipps MobilePay is already part of EPI's initiative towards pan-European cooperation, as well as Bancomat (Italy), Bizum (Spain), SIBS (Portugal).

Once Wero becomes usable in Austria, France, Germany, Benelux, and interoperable with those, the few remaining players will have a strong incentive to join.

That's the thing, if you pay with a French payment card (plastic or through Apple/Google Pay) in France, it's processed by the domestic network CB. This is also true in other European countries with their respective networks. EPI tried to bring a new pan-European card scheme that would have superseded those, it didn't work out.

On the other hand, there's a significant chunk of the population that just pays using their mobile phone. They don't care about cards, numbers (which are going to disappear anyway), or the legacy infrastructure behind that.

EPI initially wanted to become a card scheme but quickly gave up.

Plastic cards are yesterday's battle, many national schemes exist in large European countries (CB in France, Girocard in Germany, ...) and would be hard to overhaul.

Focusing on mobile payments makes sense. Once a critical mass is reached (Austria, Benelux, France, Germany) there's a clear incentive for other players to work on interoperability, even if the pricing structure might be very different.

If you can't be bothered to spend 10 seconds asking Google or your favorite LLM, I'm not sure why you come here to comment on the topic.

In most cases, you can't pay a merchant using a bank transfer. Businesses and consumers need payment systems. This is not particularly hard to grasp.

Transfers and payments aren't the same thing.

There's no need for a worldwide solution, federation and interoperability between major schemes are enough.

The same way AliPay can be used in most Asian countries already, we can imagine a world where EPI, UPI, Pix and so on interoperate smoothly.

I assume Visa and MC will try to remain walled off as the US are a big and slow mover in this space, until they'll need to open up as well.

Note: payments (unlike transfers) are never really zero fees, for good reasons.

I don't see where card schemes are inherently superior in the age of NFC payments.

There are huge countries (China, India, Brazil, ...) where people moved from cash to mobile payments.

Europe has always been in the forefront of this space, Swish exists since 2012, it's about time we get a pan-European solution.

P2P transfers are just a convenient feature, using SCT Inst behind the scenes.

Pan-European payments are the bigger deal.

There's technical possibility and then real world practicality.

For the same reason, a pure WebAuthn flow in a compliant browser could technically implement secure payment confirmation mandated by the DSP, but afaik no bank does that, and the W3C is still working on the spec.

Our governments can't even manage not to depend on Microsoft/Google/AWS (and Palantir, the US military industrial complex, Israel, ...), our banks are regularly under the fire of extraterritorial bullshit due to the USD dependence.

Being worried about consumer devices and their OS is cute, but it's missing the forest for the trees.

Funnily enough Germans do tip, for pretty average service compared to most European countries where waiters are expecting zero tips.

Only if by better you mean annoying.

I've always had good experiences in Italy even though I was a stupid tourist during peak season.

Co-branded Amex cards essentially became considered no different than 4-party cards and stopped being exempted from the cap interchange in 2018. Nothing changed for Amex proper. How would you even define interchange when it's indistinguishable from the scheme fee?

There's a reason every European PSP charges 2-4x higher fees with Amex cards.

Existing mobile wallets in Europe and beyond are absolutely eating into the market share of Visa and MC. Fraudulent transactions aren't that common since SCA became mandatory. Getting a chargeback in Europe is not trivial, this will change nothing to most consumers.