Swift is designed to be the language you reach for at every layer of the software stack. Whether you’re building embedded firmware, internet-scale services, or full-featured mobile apps, Swift delivers strong safety guarantees, performance control when you need it, and expressive language features and APIs.
good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though.
around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python.
it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift.
the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM.
I think the letdown was on the Apple side - they didn't bring in the community fast enough whether on marketing, or messaging - unfortunately Swift has remained largely an Apple ecosystem thing - with complexity now chasing C++.
Maybe Chris Lattner leaving and creating Mojo also didn’t help in that regard.
Swift for TensorFlow was a cool idea in that time …
Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it":
https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400
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Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...
We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.
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That's my read too.
Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++.
...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a small amount of what the Swift language does actually needs to be part of the language.
I'm not a Swift user, but I can tell you from C++ experience that this logic doesn't mitigate a complex programming language.
* If you're in a team (or reading code in a third-party repo) then you need to know whatever features are used in that code, even if they're not in "your" subset of the language.
* Different codebases using different subsets of the language can feel quite different, which is annoying even if you know all the features used in them.
* Even if you're writing code entirely on your own, you still end up needing to learn about more language features than you need to for your code in order that you can make an informed decision about what goes in "your" subset.
1. You don't have to use it all, but someone will. And there are over 200 keywords in the language: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183
2. On top of that many of the features in the language exist not because they were carefully designed, but because they were rushed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529006
But you have to know all of them to read other people's code.
To answer your question: I would immediately get rid of guard.
Also, I think the complexity and interplay of structs, classes, enums, protocols and now actors is staggering.
> Swift could have easily dethroned Python
No way something that compiles as slowly as Swift dethrones Python.
Edit: Plus Swift goes directly against the Zen of Python
> Explicit is better than implicit.
> Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
coupled with shitty LSP support (even to this day) makes code even harder to understand than when you `import *` in Python.
ingve