logoalt Hacker News

bnchrchtoday at 4:37 PM5 repliesview on HN

Swift has all the things I want in a language

- Strong Typing

- Great Performance

- Actor Model Concurrency [0]

- Modern Ergonomics

- Corporate Backing

- Performance

- Functional Style

- LLMs perform well with it [1]

- Usable across iOS, Android, Web, and Browsers [2][3]

The only thing its missing is adoption outside of the iOS space.

I'm not sure it will be able to make that leap, but the ingredients are there.

If it does I'd be happy to make it my primary language.

----------------

[0] https://www.hackingwithswift.com/quick-start/concurrency/wha...

[1] https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/blob/ma...

[2] https://www.swift.org/blog/nightly-swift-sdk-for-android/

[3] https://vapor.codes/


Replies

piyuvtoday at 7:20 PM

You listed “corporate backing” as a good thing and “no adoption outside Apple ecosystem” as a pain point. Why would it get adopted outside Apple ecosystem if Apple decides what happens to it?

evikstoday at 7:27 PM

Xcode isn't modern ergonomics, and neither is slow compilation (which also doubles against great performance and doubled performance)

show 1 reply
troupotoday at 5:40 PM

> - Modern Ergonomics

What does this even mean? Modern Swift looks like a haphazard mishmash of conflicting features where every problem is solved by "just one more keyword bro". In 2024 it had 217 keywords: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183 and that was reduced slightly, to 203, in 2025: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1962242782405267617

According to Lattner they never even had the time to design anything due to time pressure from Apple [1]. So Swift ended up with a type system that the compiler can't even check and is impossible to fix. So the compiler routinely just gives up and complains on even the most trivial code.

[1] https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400

--- start quote ---

Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...

We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.

--- end quote ---

show 1 reply
jnrktoday at 4:47 PM

I agree, but it's already been 15 years since it was released so I'm losing hope..