I would have preferred Rust, a language created by Mozilla instead of one with ties to Apple, but I’m not a dev so I can’t really judge. What are your thoughts?
I would have preferred Rust, a language created by Mozilla instead of one with ties to Apple, but I’m not a dev so I can’t really judge. What are your thoughts?
they explained that they chose it because it is interoperable with their existing C++ code base
But Rust is rather good at that, too, via cxx. Mozilla similarly had a C++ codebase where they wanted to integrate Rust.
Granted, this is raw theory. Maybe Swift is better in practice. But yeah, to me personally, it would need to be massively better to pretty much give up on open-source contributions.
You do realise that most major FOSS projects have an iOS app, right? The post I was looking at before this was for a new jellyfin app, small individual dev, has an iOS beta out. For a comparison, there are 9.1 million files on github in Swift, and 11.3 million in Rust.
As well, as far as contributions, Swift was designed from the getgo to be incredibly approachable for novices. While Rust is notorious for being unapproachable. Like I get the anti-Apple circlejerk is strong, but Swift is licensed under Apache 2.0, it’s FOSS, so this argument is kind of ridiculous. Especially considering how much of Google’s FOSS just gets a free pass.
Most FOSS projects weren’t allowed on the app store due to licencing, and although I think this has changed its also probably pushed off a lot of Foss devs.
Number of files doesn’t really mean much more than number of lines though, especially between languages
Barrier to contribute in Swift is wwwaaaaayyyy lower then Rust.
We once ported and Swift App to Kotlin by copy+pasting. It was one day of work.
Rust - imo - is overhyped. It has its niches. But to me it is not the swiss army knife. Swift has better expressiveness then Rust.
It isn’t, if you’re already familiar with Rust. That’s all I’m saying. Swift usage is largely isolated to Apple’s ecosystem, which doesn’t have a ton of overlap with the open-source ecosystem.
And I actually disagree that Rust is overhyped, because it can be used for creating libraries which can be called from virtually any other language, like you can with C and C++. Which means you’re not locked into the Rust/Apple/whatever ecosystem, but instead could be coding the next SQLite without needing to be fluent in footgun.
From what I can tell, this would theoretically be possible in Swift, but hasn’t been implemented: https://forums.swift.org/t/formalizing-cdecl/40677
But even if Rust was the most overhyped garbage, it would still be garbage that people are familiar with. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯