Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

I don't get this reaction.

Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity.

Hacker News: I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Like, what more do you want from them? For them to only open-source Swift Build once they've fully implemented complete parity for Windows and Linux? In the years you'd be waiting for full parity, we'd still see this same kind of comment on every story about swift, asking when they're going to open source a production-level build system.

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety?

They painted themselves in a corner. Apple being the best computing platform while trying to please everyone can never be a serious proposition. Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS, or we have to be so careful that any alternative is more interesting that what they propose.

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will never get to it.

I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."

Whatever Apple's goal is being, the result is written on the wall: Swift's brand is strongly associated to Apple ecosystem for most programmers. They won't adopt it unless they're already targeting Apple's platforms.

See C#/.Net Core. It runs on Linux for so many years. But people still treat it as "Microsoft's thing".

The goal is probably rather to allow CI on the cloud. Many companies are ok with open source licenses.

Simply open sourcing major frameworks like SwiftUI would go a long way to making it usable

For folks who want opensource there is always Gnustep and Gorm/ProjectCenter.app.

> I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. T

uh, wasn't .NET open-sourced under exactly the same pro/con, except towards Windows hegemony?

Frankly, it makes me feel bad for Chris Lattner. This guy's been worked his ass off to create a genuinely new language with all the bells and whistles he can fit, and his employer is the one that held him back the most. It took years for Foundation framework to get serious multiplatform commitment, and unless something changes drastically I think that's going to be the sour taste that developers have in their mouths.

Apple in general seems to only understand software development through the lens of oppressive control. Maybe that's a security imperative for consumer products, but in Open Source it is an outright suicide pact. You have to treat every major platform as a first-class target, otherwise the major platforms will all switch to something better.

You have a stack dump, which means you will get all the information if you symbolicate your crash report. Xcode can do it for you automatically, but some manual methods also exist.

I am getting proper error feedback,

``` swift_hello_main + 322 in swift-hello at /home/fermi/Documents/temp/swift-hello/Sources/main.swift:64:8

    62│
    63│ let a = [1]
    64│ print(a[1])
      │        ▲
    65│

```

What if you follow the advice here

>Stack dump without symbol names (ensure you have llvm-symbolizer in your PATH or set the environment var `LLVM_SYMBOLIZER_PATH` to point to it):

?

The Swift REPL sucks for this. I would suggest you compile to a binary and use your normal debugging tools.

Swift outside of Xcode is a bit rough around the edges, I think because more attention goes into making Xcode friendly. I opened Xcode, made a new playground, and hit run, the code crashes and highlights the line where the error occurred in red. Not to excuse Swift's jankyness, just saying that the kind of default experience is more an IDE-first design compared to Go's very good unix-first design.

https://monosnap.com/file/qhlwD6aXUW5bcl3TV5lPmKFDgjWDtD

Thanks for reminding me of why I shy away from Swift and dove into the arms of Kotlin Multiplatform.

Verbosity. That's..... yap-ple!

For what it's worth, they ship a solid VS Code extension and LSP. Their swift-testing package is the new open source and cross-platform successor to XCTest. The same can be said of swift-foundation as compared to Foundation.

The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations.

Personally I think the main problem with the language, besides Apple's earned poor reputation in FOSS circles, is the compile times. In the source-stable era of the language I'm not sure how they can really be fixed to the degree I'd be happy with.

Your wishlist seems midly contradictory. Why does Apple need to open-source XCode if they also provide support for 3rd party IDEs (which they already do, btw)? Also what do you not like about cocoapods for package management?

Plenty of people make an incredible amount of money building apps in Swift, so your last sentence is just wrong.

And make it possible to run binaries on macOS/iOS etc without a mandatory subscription and US export controls. Without notarisation, anything made with Swift is practically unusable on Apple OSs

It’s written Xcode.