Apple should have incrementally improved Objective-C. It was pretty nice to work with. Sure there were some warts, but it was quick to compile and easy to grok. Swift is a huge ball of slow complexity.

The decay in Apple software quality has neatly coincided with the adoption of Swift.

I can’t speak for Zig, but it seems like Rust is rather awkard with imperative UI frameworks, and instead is more inclined toward declarative/reactive frameworks. That’s one area where Swift is a bit more flexible, and one reason why I like it.

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.

also error messages are next to useless in many cases

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