A lot of good news recently for swift. I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
I really like swift going beyond Apple. Particularly the port to android is IMHO crucial, however, now they are in the UI cross platform hell. Let us see if Apple is playing this better than Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have little hope. The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second. Which I find gruesome.
It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform and I'd be singing in the streets if UIKit got ported, but that seems unlikely at best.
I believe that there's strong community interest in some kind of Swift UI framework for Android, though, and so there's a substantial chance that a third party solution will appear.
Correct me if im wrong, but isn't the pain points for mobile devs, the need to have intimate knowledge of both pl to build & maintain a good "backend/functionality" of the app over time and that the UI portion of the app is quite simple to learn, build and maintain.
So is it necessary for the swift team to try get swift ui onto android, versus a developer building their app "backend/functionality" in swift, compiling it down for both ios and android, then bridging the android bindings with a UI made in kmp etc
I recently learnt that amo and protonmail use this solution but instead of swift android, they were using uniffi-rs and seemed to have great results, I think proton ditched react native for this solution, which to me sounds like a more streamlined way of getting native performance without needing the overhead of managing multiple language. I guess we will have to see how mature swift android gets and if it can replace uniffi-rs etc which would save even more time
Jetpack Compose is just as "native" as Android views at this point; it hooks into the same accessibility frameworks and renders to the same surfaces as the framework toolkit. This isn't like Flutter which renders to an opaque Skia buffer.
I’d absolutely love it if they made SwiftUI cross platform for both mobile and desktop. Flutter is nice but it’s still sort of a mess sometimes when targeting desktop instead of mobile.
UIKit is very mature and tied to the iOS ecosystem and a bit more complex. SwiftUI is easier to port (since it is still a incomplete / subset features of UIKit).
I guess it's a matter of perspective. Dotnet 10 just came out[1] with a bunch of solid new shiny that I'm enjoying.
And, as it stands, Dotnet is much further along in the multi-platform game than Swift. As far as I know, none of the Swift-based UI stuff is being ported to, let alone going to be usable on non-Apple platforms.
> I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
Depends on what you think fancy things are. Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.
You're forgetting that C# is a 25-year-old language at this time. The exciting features they release are things like "access native memory allocation in a GC language", "native Arm64 support", "support for post-quantum cryptography", "tensor support" etc. while already running on all the platforms that Swift is only now announcing as achievements.
Are they also gonna take the reigns and officially be the maintainer of the FreeBSD package in ports or are they gonna wait for some volunteer to package it for them and choke on the bug reports whenever someone finds an issue?
> The Swift compiler and runtimes have a few dependencies. Please install the following dependencies:
> (…) python3 (…)
Wait, which part requires Python, and why? And is that only for FreeBSD, or in general? And is that something which will change? Feels very weird that a compiled systems language is dependent on a high-level scripting language.
Python and LIT are used heavily to build and test the compiler, but that is only for building it, you do not need it to download and use the built toolchain. The python dependency is more about its use in LLDB.
I’m using it on Linux for an embedded product. No reason other than it’s a nice language that I am familiar with and productive in. The async/await features are quite nice too when you need to implement a lot of protocols / state machines.
Arc browser famously had native parts of the UI done in Swift, which admittedly is not a lot: browser tabs, some popups and buttons here and there, a lot of their settings UI is rendered in HTML and is stock Chromium. Which is probably why they actually made a port of it to run on Windows rather than rewriting it into something like Qt or WPF or whatever.
Ladybird browser team planned to start using Swift in their codebase, but it hasn't happen yet.
Personally I stay away from Corp owned languages. Even cross platform ones like .net, Java and also swift. With the single commercial party owning it you never know if theyll close it, change things for the worse or get acquired by a hostile party which obviously happened to java :(
Which language would you classify as not corp owned?
It’s also weird to include Java and Swift in that list considering both afaik are maintained by a separate foundation. Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.
> Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.
Note that Oracle contributes around 90% of the work to OpenJDK. If they decided to stop working on it, there would be a big gap to fill.
That’s generally true of most languages. Rust is struggling with this right now.
I’d say though that Oracle is highly unlikely to stop working on Java and Google is still invested in the JDK even though they’re trying to shift new code in this space towards Kotlin (another “corp owned” language)
There are 10 different answers for how to take a substring by index+len, depending on which version of Swift. They even changed how arrays as function parameters work between versions.
Chicken/egg, I think. There was a burst of activity of Swift on the server a few years ago and frameworks like Vapor seem like they’re still pretty active:
But I think “why” remains a valid question when you could make a safe pick like Node, Python etc. I really like Swift as a language but I’d still struggle to justify using it outside of iOS.
Don't know of large organizations using it in production, the vibe I get is that it's useful for an iOS developer who wants to deploy a small server for their product without learning Python or Javascript.
You could certainly use it at larger scale, but you have to justify giving up the big ecosystems of its competitors.
Swift is absolutely not a peer to Rust. Even without GC, Swift comes with a substantial runtime to enable a lot of features that precludes such a comparison like everything to do with messages and actors. With regards to safety, Swift's data isolation system is cute, but isn't comparable to a substructural type system at all, and it's useless if you're not writing code that uses actors.
Most of what makes Rust's safety powerful is that lifetime analysis is universal and highly granular. Things like no dangling references to local variables, no 'collection cycles', handling parametric code, etc. are basic features that Swift can't provide. On top of it all, the whole system is ruinously complicated compared to Rust's type system. That's the sad reality of what happens when you try to implement something so fundamental as an extra bolt-on to a language that can't properly accomidate it.
On the other hand, Swift has a more gentle learning curve with plenty of progressive disclosure (many features aren't strictly required to build something useful) and generally more approachable syntax.
Swift is also more conducive to "old style" retain mode imperative UI frameworks like AppKit (sometimes declarative and/or immediate mode doesn't fit the bill), which has to date been a major weak point for Rust.
For what it's worth, I'm not an active user (or fan) of Rust. I've just used a lot of languages, it's a hobby of mine to learn new tools.
> a more gentle learning curve ... and generally more approachable syntax.
This is all the more reason it's not a peer. The heavyweight class Rust belongs to (which includes things like Sepples, ATS, Ada/SPARK, D) are as a rule not approachable things. All of them are serious industrial tools whose target audience are experienced professionals that prioritize extremely broad functionality and flexibility in output. What the input looks like, or the cost of learning to operate these tools is not even a consideration for this audience. Swift doesn't fit this bill. It simply compromises too much for things that this class of language isn't concerned with. People reaching for a new language in this class aren't thinking about how easy it is to learn, or even how nice it is to use. Rust abandoned ML-family syntax to babyduck C++ at massive cost to its "niceness".
On syntax, do you mean semantics? Syntactically they're both generic curly-brace algol stuff with minor differences at best. Semantically Rust is certainly more complicated.
> which has to date been a major weak point for Rust.
It's very ironic, given Rust's original purpose was to replace C++ as the implementation language for Firefox. Retained mode GUIs have unfortunately fallen by the wayside due to a number of factors, it's not just unique to Rust. If a language hasn't inherited a legacy retained mode lib, it's not likely it'll get a decent one unless it's really lucky. Unfortunate, because you're right, retained mode GUIs absolutely have their upsides and web browsers aren't a solid replacement. They're just complicated to implement, and computers are fast enough now that the much simpler immediate mode paradigm is the choice for every new framework being written. It is what it is.
Swift concurrency used to be a bit rough around the edges, but since Swift 5.5 it uses async/await and structured concurrency, which has been a massive improvement. We also have built in ways to handle data races around mutable state with actors and the main thread with @MainActor.
Rust has a more explicit and strict approach to ownership/borrowing for sure, but I’d argue Swift has worked to be memory safe be default since the start, with ARC, no unchecked pointer arithmetic in normal code, etc. it’s still tightly coupled to Apple platforms, but the swiftlang teams has been hard at work changing that and I think it’s a fine language to start new projects with in 2025.
I guess so. In a way it makes sense if you can share your code base between the iOS/MacOS app and your backend. It makes development easier. But I guess that the majority of apps is not running MacOS servers for the backend. So far it's probably some node backends and all going JSON inbetween. But for some dedicated apps without a web portal inbetween it might be easier if app and backend are both in Swift.
> …and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.
Worth noting that Gradle's long list of capabilities can sometimes be as much of a liability (or at least a frustration) as it is a boon. A great many projects don't need even a fifth of its complexity.
Not true at all. Swift is a very capable backend language, Apple has open sourced a lot of great libraries to power server software development, and there are projects like Vapor [0] that are used in production.
Ah. You're right, I phrased that ambiguously, sorry.
I meant to point out that there is no apple native cloud solution where you can run swift on apple hardware.
So if your iOS app needs to talk to a backend that you want to develop and host, you need to run that backend on an OS with cloud support, like Linux, some other Unix or windows. But not macOS or some other "Apple cloud" hosting.
For reasons stated above, you might in that case choose Swift.
Ah, gotcha—yes, that is actually a pain point and a strange omission. If you need to run backend code for any reason to support your app, Apple literally offers nothing.
IBM at one point offered Swift "serverless" lambdas/cloud functions, which made me briefly hopeful that Apple could do the same, but that service was deprecated years ago, and Apple has shown no motion there.
SwiftUI is build upon Apple's frameworks like Metal, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, and UIKit / AppKit. If someone want's to make a version for another platform, they will have a whole lot of work to do. That is the real show stopper, and not the core SwiftUI features like many were led to believe
Thats cool I knew those were coming but the most interesting thing in here is that it seems to be running the Linux images under the Linuxlator layer (hence he had to enable the linux server) as opposed to creating a Linux VM like the other operating system do. Pretty cool!
Yeah talk about reinventing the wheel so Linux people don’t have to learn a slightly different system (one that is ironically easier to use and better organized than Oci containers).
I absolutely love Swift. I understand some may disagree, and perhaps many of their arguments are quite valid. However, no language is perfect, and I just feel like Swift has some features that shows that a lot of thought was put into some features -- not to disrespect any other languages.
Considering the static typing, guard statements, protocols, lack of ++/-- operators (Lattner's argument was convincing), let/var, being able to make function parameters immutable, being able to lock symbols down to the file level, easy integration with c languages, etc..
I have not used SwiftUI, so I cannot judge it, but I do not think any issues with it are compelling arguments against Swift as a language (that I have read).
Lattner is my modern-age programming-hero. I'm glad to see FreeBSD will be able to share the love soon enough.
And SwiftUI is not part of Swift open source, it's just for Apple platforms. The underlying Swift language features could be used by other UI systems if someone wanted to make a crossplatform system, though.
what i am pondering is: is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes, the fact that llvm favors linux (?) tells me both.
also, congrats, the swift and freebsd are ambitious in terms of new deployment platforms and compatibility! (see embedded swift, oci freebsd containers, freebsd on firecracker)
> is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes
That shared history goes back a LONG way. The base components from FreeBSD that are in macOS are absolutely ancient. I think the most modern shared components are just the userland tools.
So I don't think it would make much difference at all.
Wow, this is great news. I still don't understand why it has taken so long, when Swift on Linux has been around for 10 years. But as a FreeBSD user, this is very welcome!
It’s a fantastic language? I’ve come to really like it. Strong type system, is it to work with, lots of resources available, compiles to a binary, interfacing with any other language that you can link to with C, the syntax doesn’t look ugly to me (quite subjective), excellent concurrency support…
A lot of good news recently for swift. I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
I really like swift going beyond Apple. Particularly the port to android is IMHO crucial, however, now they are in the UI cross platform hell. Let us see if Apple is playing this better than Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have little hope. The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second. Which I find gruesome.
It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform and I'd be singing in the streets if UIKit got ported, but that seems unlikely at best.
I believe that there's strong community interest in some kind of Swift UI framework for Android, though, and so there's a substantial chance that a third party solution will appear.
Correct me if im wrong, but isn't the pain points for mobile devs, the need to have intimate knowledge of both pl to build & maintain a good "backend/functionality" of the app over time and that the UI portion of the app is quite simple to learn, build and maintain.
So is it necessary for the swift team to try get swift ui onto android, versus a developer building their app "backend/functionality" in swift, compiling it down for both ios and android, then bridging the android bindings with a UI made in kmp etc
I recently learnt that amo and protonmail use this solution but instead of swift android, they were using uniffi-rs and seemed to have great results, I think proton ditched react native for this solution, which to me sounds like a more streamlined way of getting native performance without needing the overhead of managing multiple language. I guess we will have to see how mature swift android gets and if it can replace uniffi-rs etc which would save even more time
From what I've read, SwiftUI is using parts of UIKit under the hood, so it also doesn't seem too likely.
skip.tools is one third-party solution for creating Swift + SwiftUI apps for Android today.
It still translates SwiftUI to Kotlin+Compose, right? Very cool and useful, but not quite the same as a Swift-based UI framework for Android.
Oops, TIL Jetpack Compose doesn't use Android native controls. That is unfortunate.
Jetpack Compose is just as "native" as Android views at this point; it hooks into the same accessibility frameworks and renders to the same surfaces as the framework toolkit. This isn't like Flutter which renders to an opaque Skia buffer.
Great! I appreciate the claification, thank you.
I’d absolutely love it if they made SwiftUI cross platform for both mobile and desktop. Flutter is nice but it’s still sort of a mess sometimes when targeting desktop instead of mobile.
SwiftUI is also a mess when targeting desktop (macOS).
UIKit is very mature and tied to the iOS ecosystem and a bit more complex. SwiftUI is easier to port (since it is still a incomplete / subset features of UIKit).
> It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform
It's a nearly impossible task. Just ask Qt, who have been at this for thirty years.
SwiftUI is more realistic actually. UIKit, much tougher (more mature, more tied to the IOS ecosystem).
Highly doubt it, Safari on Windows ran on AppKit and that thing is from the early 1990s. You'd be surprised how high level UIKit actually is.
Source?
I guess it's a matter of perspective. Dotnet 10 just came out[1] with a bunch of solid new shiny that I'm enjoying.
And, as it stands, Dotnet is much further along in the multi-platform game than Swift. As far as I know, none of the Swift-based UI stuff is being ported to, let alone going to be usable on non-Apple platforms.
1. https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/whats-new-in-net-10/
Speaking of .NET, I've been successfully running .NET 9 on AMD64 FreeBSD. It's nice to have that choice.
> I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.
Depends on what you think fancy things are. Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.
You're forgetting that C# is a 25-year-old language at this time. The exciting features they release are things like "access native memory allocation in a GC language", "native Arm64 support", "support for post-quantum cryptography", "tensor support" etc. while already running on all the platforms that Swift is only now announcing as achievements.
Yeah, also the ecosystem, aspire, ef core, Orleans, ML.NET etc..at this point I don't know what's really missing.
>The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second
Flutter is not a language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutter_(software)
From that page:
>Flutter apps are written in the Dart language.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)
Are they also gonna take the reigns and officially be the maintainer of the FreeBSD package in ports or are they gonna wait for some volunteer to package it for them and choke on the bug reports whenever someone finds an issue?
> The Swift compiler and runtimes have a few dependencies. Please install the following dependencies:
> (…) python3 (…)
Wait, which part requires Python, and why? And is that only for FreeBSD, or in general? And is that something which will change? Feels very weird that a compiled systems language is dependent on a high-level scripting language.
The Swift toolchain includes LLDB, which relies on python for some debugging features. The compiler and runtime itself do not use python.
It's likely that Swift compiler is using LLVM LIT (https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/lit.html), which is implemented in python, as the test driver
Python and LIT are used heavily to build and test the compiler, but that is only for building it, you do not need it to download and use the built toolchain. The python dependency is more about its use in LLDB.
LLDB also needs python if you want to use its scripting integration.
https://github.com/orgs/swiftlang/repositories?q=lang%3Apyth... From a quick look, appears to be the test suite. Which makes sense, hard to validate your language with itself.
That greatly depends on the codebase and the language.
https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel/blob/master/tests/...
it's not weird at all - you need something sensible to run complicated things while bootstrapping the compiler. Rust does the same thing: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-...
Do people use Swift outside of Apple iOS/macOS development in real life? Especially on platforms like Windows/Linux/*BSD?
I’m using it on Linux for an embedded product. No reason other than it’s a nice language that I am familiar with and productive in. The async/await features are quite nice too when you need to implement a lot of protocols / state machines.
Arc browser famously had native parts of the UI done in Swift, which admittedly is not a lot: browser tabs, some popups and buttons here and there, a lot of their settings UI is rendered in HTML and is stock Chromium. Which is probably why they actually made a port of it to run on Windows rather than rewriting it into something like Qt or WPF or whatever.
Ladybird browser team planned to start using Swift in their codebase, but it hasn't happen yet.
Personally I stay away from Corp owned languages. Even cross platform ones like .net, Java and also swift. With the single commercial party owning it you never know if theyll close it, change things for the worse or get acquired by a hostile party which obviously happened to java :(
Which language would you classify as not corp owned?
It’s also weird to include Java and Swift in that list considering both afaik are maintained by a separate foundation. Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.
> Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.
Note that Oracle contributes around 90% of the work to OpenJDK. If they decided to stop working on it, there would be a big gap to fill.
That’s generally true of most languages. Rust is struggling with this right now.
I’d say though that Oracle is highly unlikely to stop working on Java and Google is still invested in the JDK even though they’re trying to shift new code in this space towards Kotlin (another “corp owned” language)
Apple’s the exception that proves the rule, they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices
> they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices
They do not.
They talk a good game, but the development tools, bright and shiny, but mostly work.
Mostly, is not good enough.
While they have so much mind share in the USA they are unavoidable. But from a developer perspective they are dire
As of two years ago. I find it hard to believe they have changed
There are 10 different answers for how to take a substring by index+len, depending on which version of Swift. They even changed how arrays as function parameters work between versions.
Chicken/egg, I think. There was a burst of activity of Swift on the server a few years ago and frameworks like Vapor seem like they’re still pretty active:
https://vapor.codes/
But I think “why” remains a valid question when you could make a safe pick like Node, Python etc. I really like Swift as a language but I’d still struggle to justify using it outside of iOS.
There were three major server side Swift projects, and Vapor is the surviving one from that era
Dead projects are
- Kitura https://github.com/Kitura/Kitura
- Perfect https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/Perfect
Don't know of large organizations using it in production, the vibe I get is that it's useful for an iOS developer who wants to deploy a small server for their product without learning Python or Javascript.
You could certainly use it at larger scale, but you have to justify giving up the big ecosystems of its competitors.
There’s also hummingbird: https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird
Swift is a peer to Rust, not Node / Python. It has some nice affordances that Rust doesn't, while still being a native-compiled language.
Swift is absolutely not a peer to Rust. Even without GC, Swift comes with a substantial runtime to enable a lot of features that precludes such a comparison like everything to do with messages and actors. With regards to safety, Swift's data isolation system is cute, but isn't comparable to a substructural type system at all, and it's useless if you're not writing code that uses actors.
Most of what makes Rust's safety powerful is that lifetime analysis is universal and highly granular. Things like no dangling references to local variables, no 'collection cycles', handling parametric code, etc. are basic features that Swift can't provide. On top of it all, the whole system is ruinously complicated compared to Rust's type system. That's the sad reality of what happens when you try to implement something so fundamental as an extra bolt-on to a language that can't properly accomidate it.
On the other hand, Swift has a more gentle learning curve with plenty of progressive disclosure (many features aren't strictly required to build something useful) and generally more approachable syntax.
Swift is also more conducive to "old style" retain mode imperative UI frameworks like AppKit (sometimes declarative and/or immediate mode doesn't fit the bill), which has to date been a major weak point for Rust.
For what it's worth, I'm not an active user (or fan) of Rust. I've just used a lot of languages, it's a hobby of mine to learn new tools.
> a more gentle learning curve ... and generally more approachable syntax.
This is all the more reason it's not a peer. The heavyweight class Rust belongs to (which includes things like Sepples, ATS, Ada/SPARK, D) are as a rule not approachable things. All of them are serious industrial tools whose target audience are experienced professionals that prioritize extremely broad functionality and flexibility in output. What the input looks like, or the cost of learning to operate these tools is not even a consideration for this audience. Swift doesn't fit this bill. It simply compromises too much for things that this class of language isn't concerned with. People reaching for a new language in this class aren't thinking about how easy it is to learn, or even how nice it is to use. Rust abandoned ML-family syntax to babyduck C++ at massive cost to its "niceness".
On syntax, do you mean semantics? Syntactically they're both generic curly-brace algol stuff with minor differences at best. Semantically Rust is certainly more complicated.
> which has to date been a major weak point for Rust.
It's very ironic, given Rust's original purpose was to replace C++ as the implementation language for Firefox. Retained mode GUIs have unfortunately fallen by the wayside due to a number of factors, it's not just unique to Rust. If a language hasn't inherited a legacy retained mode lib, it's not likely it'll get a decent one unless it's really lucky. Unfortunate, because you're right, retained mode GUIs absolutely have their upsides and web browsers aren't a solid replacement. They're just complicated to implement, and computers are fast enough now that the much simpler immediate mode paradigm is the choice for every new framework being written. It is what it is.
It's more of a peer to Go
In the case of Vapors (building "HTTP servers, backends and APIs") I'd say Node and Python are absolutely alternatives.
So is https://gotham.rs/!
I think they were just talking about the language features, not building web services generally
Does not support Windows.
Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety and data race safety by default.
Data race safety is not offered by default. In Swift 6.2 you can enable strict mode and it will cover majority of data race problem, but not all.
Not really that much
It's been two years since I was an iOSSwift programmer, but the concurrent/parallel facilities were quite woeful. Memory protection no nonexsistant
I do not miss it. This might be useful for porting Apple software, but do not start new projects with it.
Swift concurrency used to be a bit rough around the edges, but since Swift 5.5 it uses async/await and structured concurrency, which has been a massive improvement. We also have built in ways to handle data races around mutable state with actors and the main thread with @MainActor.
Rust has a more explicit and strict approach to ownership/borrowing for sure, but I’d argue Swift has worked to be memory safe be default since the start, with ARC, no unchecked pointer arithmetic in normal code, etc. it’s still tightly coupled to Apple platforms, but the swiftlang teams has been hard at work changing that and I think it’s a fine language to start new projects with in 2025.
> Memory protection no nonexsistant
Exclusivity is guaranteed by the compiler, and Apple has integrated tagged pointers on arm while Linux/x86 is still thinking about it.
I guess so. In a way it makes sense if you can share your code base between the iOS/MacOS app and your backend. It makes development easier. But I guess that the majority of apps is not running MacOS servers for the backend. So far it's probably some node backends and all going JSON inbetween. But for some dedicated apps without a web portal inbetween it might be easier if app and backend are both in Swift.
It'd be nice to use it for server side too, but the ecosystem is really not mature and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.
Plus, most of the open source libs are one person's weekend projects, from 3 years ago...
It's a great language, but nowadays tooling/ecosystem and build systems are key to success.
> …and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.
Worth noting that Gradle's long list of capabilities can sometimes be as much of a liability (or at least a frustration) as it is a boon. A great many projects don't need even a fifth of its complexity.
It’s not super popular, but support is necessary to make it so. There are some well-regarded frameworks, like Vapor, that are written in Swift.
Only for iOS apps. Apple does not offer a backend.
Not true at all. Swift is a very capable backend language, Apple has open sourced a lot of great libraries to power server software development, and there are projects like Vapor [0] that are used in production.
[0]: https://vapor.codes
Ah. You're right, I phrased that ambiguously, sorry.
I meant to point out that there is no apple native cloud solution where you can run swift on apple hardware.
So if your iOS app needs to talk to a backend that you want to develop and host, you need to run that backend on an OS with cloud support, like Linux, some other Unix or windows. But not macOS or some other "Apple cloud" hosting.
For reasons stated above, you might in that case choose Swift.
Ah, gotcha—yes, that is actually a pain point and a strange omission. If you need to run backend code for any reason to support your app, Apple literally offers nothing.
IBM at one point offered Swift "serverless" lambdas/cloud functions, which made me briefly hopeful that Apple could do the same, but that service was deprecated years ago, and Apple has shown no motion there.
Could SwiftUI ever be used outside of Apple?
SwiftUI is build upon Apple's frameworks like Metal, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, and UIKit / AppKit. If someone want's to make a version for another platform, they will have a whole lot of work to do. That is the real show stopper, and not the core SwiftUI features like many were led to believe
Probably not, Apple would have to opensource it and that’s unlikely
No
I believe apple is making OCI-compliant containers which is written in swift. I hope this helps the containerization in FreeBSD.
Just this week the foundation dropped an article about OCI compliant containeraztion: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...
Thats cool I knew those were coming but the most interesting thing in here is that it seems to be running the Linux images under the Linuxlator layer (hence he had to enable the linux server) as opposed to creating a Linux VM like the other operating system do. Pretty cool!
This is awesome. I have an Omada container running on my desktop that would be great to move to my FreeBSD server.
In what sense? FreeBSD had containers before anyone heard about Docker ;)
Jails are great but are not OCI-compliant.
Jails are not containers.
By what definition would LXC be containers and jails not be?
Yeah talk about reinventing the wheel so Linux people don’t have to learn a slightly different system (one that is ironically easier to use and better organized than Oci containers).
Porting on more platforms is always great, and a good way to find hidden assumptions.
Loving all the new developments with FreeBSD.
I absolutely love Swift. I understand some may disagree, and perhaps many of their arguments are quite valid. However, no language is perfect, and I just feel like Swift has some features that shows that a lot of thought was put into some features -- not to disrespect any other languages.
Considering the static typing, guard statements, protocols, lack of ++/-- operators (Lattner's argument was convincing), let/var, being able to make function parameters immutable, being able to lock symbols down to the file level, easy integration with c languages, etc..
I have not used SwiftUI, so I cannot judge it, but I do not think any issues with it are compelling arguments against Swift as a language (that I have read).
Lattner is my modern-age programming-hero. I'm glad to see FreeBSD will be able to share the love soon enough.
And SwiftUI is not part of Swift open source, it's just for Apple platforms. The underlying Swift language features could be used by other UI systems if someone wanted to make a crossplatform system, though.
Swift is such an excellent language. I hope it continues to grow outside of the Apple ecosystem.
what i am pondering is: is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes, the fact that llvm favors linux (?) tells me both.
also, congrats, the swift and freebsd are ambitious in terms of new deployment platforms and compatibility! (see embedded swift, oci freebsd containers, freebsd on firecracker)
> is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes
That shared history goes back a LONG way. The base components from FreeBSD that are in macOS are absolutely ancient. I think the most modern shared components are just the userland tools.
So I don't think it would make much difference at all.
Why would llvm favor linux? FreeBSD also officially moved from GCC to LLVM for the base system, so I don't see why LLVM wouldn't support it.
a good question, my line of thinking was: if llvm allows easy ports to freebsd, why is freebsd always a lower tier than linux in llvm based projects?
weak reasoning, as it might just be a supply/demand and not a product quality question
> Why…
It’s almost always available resources.
Possibly demand as well. We know that Apple operates a whole bunch of Linux servers, do we know if they’re running FreeBSD internally?
I would say that LLVM is more important to FreeBSD than it is to Linux.
I don’t know whether you know, but there has been a Linux port for quite a while (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-linux-port/ is from December 2015).
https://www.swift.org/install/linux/ points to https://hub.docker.com/_/swift, which has images for Red Hat, Amazon Linux, maybe others.
Wow, this is great news. I still don't understand why it has taken so long, when Swift on Linux has been around for 10 years. But as a FreeBSD user, this is very welcome!
What can you build with Swift on FreeBSD which isn't easier with other languages?
Everything will be easier to build with Swift on FreeBSD for a Swift developer compared to any other language
Software that is meant to run on Apple platforms.
Swift on Apple and Swift on literally-everything-else are very different stories at the moment.
absolutely not
I'm not complaining, but also why?
It’s a fantastic language? I’ve come to really like it. Strong type system, is it to work with, lots of resources available, compiles to a binary, interfacing with any other language that you can link to with C, the syntax doesn’t look ugly to me (quite subjective), excellent concurrency support…
What can I say I’m a fan.
Why not? Why wouldn't an open source project want their increasingly platform-agnostic language to be supported on as many platforms as possible?