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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ingve