Comment by killingtime74 9 hours ago
Even if it's the same (faster horse?) I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked. Yes it could continue on as a fork but it's development velocity would suffer.
Apple was the primary and only major sponsor of Objective-C, used it as the core foundation of their entire platform, and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony. Yes, being tied so closely to Apple is an existential risk for Swift. One need only look at the quality and trajectory of MacOS to see that Apple isn't a software company, let alone a company that cares about developer experience (Xcode, anyone?). As far as modern Apple is concerned, the primary benefit of Swift is that it produces a tiny bit extra lock-in for iOS apps, by making cross-platform development more difficult.
People still write applications in Objective-C (e.g., see Transmission [1]), and the language is still maintained to support the latest OS. If anything, Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift, since you can at least use the latter outside of Apple platforms (e.g., on a server).
> Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift
Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2].
"and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony"
What?! This is complete nonsense. Swift was introduced 11 (!) years ago and it was clear from day one that it was going to be the future. Every single year since the introduction there were clear messages and hints in documentation and WWDC that Swift is in and Objective-C will _eventually_ be out.
Little warning? Maybe if you kept your eyes closed the past 11 years.
And do not forget that today you can still write apps in Objective-C.
Whether or not Apple still has legacy pieces in Objective-C or still allows you to write apps in it is not the issue. The point here is that Apple shadow-dropped Swift and shifted essentially all of its development priority away from Objective-C in a matter of months.
Power users of Subway Surfers, maybe. Modern macOS is a tragedy: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/12/is-apple-keeping-its-pro...
Rust of all languages, now that it's been majorly adopted by many companies big and small, has a higher risk of losing support over a language developed exclusively by one corporation? I sincerely doubt that.
> I would rather use Rust for the fact it's development is not tied to a big tech company which could abandon it if they liked.
Go's development is tied to Google Inc. and is widely used at Google. Same with Microsoft's C# with .NET and Swift isn't very different to this as long as it is open source.
So this really is a moot point.
Go has a critical mass that Swift clearly doesn't (i.e. there are many, many companies who have net profits of >$1bn and write most of their server software in Go).
Additionally Google isn't selling Go as a product in the same way as Apple does Swift (and where Google does publish public Go APIs it also tends to use them in the same way as their users do, so the interests are more aligned)...
First sentence of the wiki page [1]:
> Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community.
As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)
Swift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.
> The community was very against function builders.
Scanning the multiple review threads, that doesn't appear to be the case. According to the acceptance post, the community was overall positive about the feature but expressed concerns over the attribute naming, which was renamed in response.
I know Swift is technically not Apple specific, but it says right there in your quote that it was created for Apple and Apple is the giant weight behind it.
I doubt Apple is in danger of dropping Swift, but if they did it would create a devastating vacuum in the Swift ecosystem.
It's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol
If we're going to be concerned about any language languishing due to a lack of support... like, I don't think people are going to put "Apple dropping support" as anywhere near their shortlist. Rust has a higher risk of losing support.