I got into macOS development when Swift was first released, and used it heavily up until 2022 or so. I think I agree with you. The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex. And I think the issues are fundamental.
It sucks because I’m willing to develop for macOS exclusively, but the whole package is so rough and frustrating. Somehow they had every advantage (endless resources and complete platform control) and couldn’t put something together that’s better than Rust/Zig/whatever. Not to mention the inability to ship any useful AI developer tools, the dumb constraint of only shipping new major updates once a year at WWDC, the lack of ANY modern game development framework, etc..
I think I’ve finally talked myself into giving up on it.
The decay in Apple software quality has neatly coincided with the adoption of Swift.
While I like to write simpler bits of UI in something like SwiftUI (think small components, recycled cells, etc) I find that declarative UI gets increasingly cumbersome as projects gain more features and become complex, and that doesn’t change much with the language it’s written in. As such my projects tend to be imperative-dominant with declarative components and maybe simpler screens sprinkled throughout. UIKit and SwiftUI work together nicely for this.
The only issue is the lack of UI frameworks for non-Apple platforms. There’s decent GTK+Adwaita bindings for Swift which is pretty solid for Linux, but to my knowledge the only thing out there for Windows at the moment are WinUI bindings written by The Browser Company for Arc, but as I understand it those are still pretty incomplete.
Compile times haven’t be a problem for me, even with complex codebases. Incremental builds are fast enough and I’m not running full builds often enough for that to impact my overall evaluation of the language.
> The compiler is just too slow, and the language is too complex.
this really trips up new users and (speaking from experience) unless you have someone that can mentor them they're gonna give up pretty fast
swift is evolving so quickly to fill gaps in capabilities but the tooling and ux of actually coding (speed, error messages, fixits etc) really needs heavy work badly imo
I wish they'd keep updating AppleScript more, or just completely replace it, but I do not blame Apple on that one. Swift could absolutely replace AppleScript in terms of functionality, but that wouldn't make Apple any money. So, we all know that will never happen.
the xcode ui part can be open sourced so the community evolve/improve it better since apple has like max 3 people working on it apparently
Additionally Apple isn't Google, Swift has more chances to survive as proprietary language on Apple ecosystem, than Dart as FOSS if Google ever gets bored as usual.
Flutter does 120fps with ease I’m also confused what you’re talking about there too
Developing was also frustrating, with Android Studio simply being unable to signal compilation errors, and many issues only showing up on one phone or another. The zeroconf libraries have different methods, but this could not be detected until runtime on either device. The device I wasn’t actively testing on frequently had some regression in sensors, bluetooth, or even UI.
It did display an animation OK, so no fault there I suppose.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from...
https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/con...
You’re making shit up. Take the L and move on
And Google Earth - as opposed to Google maps, Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc is not a “major app”.
Flutter and Dart are going to end up in the same graveyard as many of their other products - https://killedbygoogle.com/
I can’t ever see Swift on the server or in other contexts catching on and honestly just with the way platforms as a whole are developing I can’t see Swift surviving as a mainstream language beyond the next 5 years. Its value proposition is already on shaky grounds and is actively getting worse with time the moment you look outside Apple’s walled garden. Unless they are able to keep that lock in at the same level moving forward it’s just got very little going for it.
I think something like 1/3 apps in the App Store are ALREADY written in Dart / Flutter which is probably even a nicer language from a developer experience point of view, with much much better tooling and documentation, that runs everywhere and has comparable performance.