Comment by frizlab 7 hours ago
I still don’t understand the Xcode rant. Using Swift can be done in any LSP-compatible text editor (VSCode, which even has a first-party extension for Swift, but also zed, Sublime Text, etc.)
Unless you’re doing Apple-specific development, you don’t need Xcode.
I recently really wanted to use Swift server side because of all the updates to Vapor.
Ran vapor new. Tried to build the project. Laptop spun for minutes and got really hot. Then I gave up and just went back to the usual.
Why would you bother using Swift if you're not targeting Apple? I can imagine wanting to use it for something cross-platform that is primarily an ios/macos thing.
But if you don't want to include those I wouldn't pick a language that's under control of a company I don't use.
It's a bit like using c# or powershell on Linux. Yes it can be done and it's helpful for cross platform with windows but I wouldn't consider it a first class citizen.
I was talking about this at a party this afternoon (yes, I do go to the most interesting parties, thanks) and while Scheme is acceptable the Common Lisp is not because it's not OK to go without boolean primitives. Types are a good idea, if you have types the simplest is clearly the boolean, so start there.
I believe firmly that there should be a single true value, which we might reasonably name true, and a single false value, false, other values aren't booleans, so it's no more reasonable to ask whether an empty string is false, than to just forget to close the quote marks on a string. What we wrote isn't a correct program.
Common Lisp is actually a great language. The SBCL implementation has a good compiler that produce reasonably fast code, and it's under active development.
The only real drawback to common lisp is the fact that the library ecosystem is practically non-existent.
What company is using Swift outside of Apple-specific development?
Arc, TBCNY's browser for macOS and Windows uses Swift [1] [2].
Their newer Dia browser which is meant to be cross-platform also uses Swift.
[1]: https://speakinginswift.substack.com/p/swift-tooling-windows...
[2]: "How we're building the Arc Browser Windows app with Swift" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_fNuaSE_I
> What company is using Swift outside of Apple-specific development?
Skip allows to "Build truly native iPhone and Android apps with Skip" so technically skip runs swift on android which is outside of Apple-specific development.
They also recently got open source from their closed source model prior from what I can tell
LSP support isn't great. It keeps improving however. Used to get quite a few crashes. And I think background indexing still doesn't work.