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.
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.
>I t's a bit like using c# or powershell on Linux… but I wouldn't consider it a first class citizen.
C# is very very much a first class citizen on Linux. It may not be native, but you can run binaries on Linux without needing the runtime when you compile it to target the platform.
I wrote a couple of monoservices on my Mac using c# which ran perfectly on my Microk8s cluster on Linux.
I have nearly a decade of experience building .NET C# solutions on Linux and lately also on Mac, with almost everything hosted on Linux via Docker. I’m not sure what’s still missing for it to be accepted into the "first class citizen" club by the Linux elite.
> 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
Agreed. People use any thread mentioning swift to dunk on Apple for X number of reasons with vague details and regurgitated dogma. I get Xcode has quirks I use it everyday believe me I know but it's not that bad that it's unusable.
> I get Xcode has quirks I use it everyday believe me I know but it's not that bad that it's unusable.
It's not unusable, but it's not that great either. When I have a project that requires Xcode I certainly don't look forward to it the way I do such as wehn I have a project that doesn't need any specific IDE.
As a sidenote; I recently (1 year ago, maybe?) did a C project in Eclipse, and was blown away but just how snappy, quick and, utlimately, enjoyable it was compared to VS Code.
Yeah, so I tried XCode with a couple of years ago. Within 2 hours of working on my very first project, it somehow corrupted either my project's metadata and/or its own internal preferences so badly that it would no longer launch - it would just crash to Desktop instantly. Literally the most unusable application I've used in recent memory!
Unless you’re doing Apple-specific development, you don’t need Xcode.