Swift is pretty good.

As a language, I really like it. It feels very much like a cousin to Rust with a few tradeoffs to be more ergonomic.

The standard library is pretty good but the extended ecosystem is not as strong outside of Apple platforms, though that is improving.

If the ecosystem improved, like this project here, it would probably be my go to language. Failing that it’s usually rust , Python, C# and C++ for me.

UI libraries outside of Apple frameworks is about as weak as all those other languages if you don’t have Qt bindings. Qt does have Swift bindings officially in the works though so that could change.

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zozbot234 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> It feels very much like a cousin to Rust with a few tradeoffs to be more ergonomic.

Rust can be just as ergonomic. It takes some minor boilerplate of course, since you're resorting to coding patterns that are somewhat unidiomatic - but not nearly as much as the likes of C# or Java.

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dagmx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree that rust can be as ergonomic. I’ve been writing rust for longer than Swift , and there’s a lot of niceties in Swift.

Default parameters, null shortcircuits, lazy static initializers, computed properties, ease of binding to C++, RC by default, defer.

Both languages are great, but I don’t think they’re on the same ergonomic level by any means.

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hypeatei 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> ease of binding to C++

I wouldn't really call this an "ergonomic" feature of a language. That's a whole research project.

Regardless, C++ interop in Swift isn't straightforward and there are a multitude of issues. One being that you need to compile your C++ codebase with Apples fork of LLVM and in some cases add annotations in your C++ so that Swift plays nice (which basically isn't interop at that point)

You can see the Ladybird projects issue tracker[0] and issues on the Swift forum that LB maintainers have created[1][2] to get an idea. Swift adoption has stalled due to these.

0: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

1: https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-browser-and-swift-garbag...

2: https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-gc-and-imported-class-hi...

	▲	dagmx an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s not perfect but if that’s your standard, then that cuts a lot of stuff from both languages :-) I’m not sure why annotations are a bad thing to you. They’re not necessarily swift specific and could benefit other bindings too, and their existence doesn’t mitigate that it’s a binding. Or do you not consider rust being bindable to any non-C language since you’d have to write CFFI bindings in between?
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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