[HN Gopher] Redesigned Swift.org is now live
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Redesigned Swift.org is now live
Author : lawgimenez
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-06-04 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (swift.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (swift.org)
| AndriyKunitsyn wrote:
| Cool. If only some of this effort went into improving Swift
| Package Manager.
| fckgw wrote:
| Yes I'm sure the people responsible for the website front end
| will get right on that.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I noticed that Go's and TypeScript's websites are massively more
| complicated than they were 10-15 years ago, much harder to find
| basically anything without google, which Swift's feels close to.
| But Lua's site remains as easy to use as ever.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| to your point, i've often suspected Python caught on because of
| the clarity of its documentation.
| fidotron wrote:
| The book about Lua (Programming in Lua) is a masterpiece, and
| one of the essential programming books.
|
| If I could write that well in my first language I could
| probably triple my income. To do it in a second one is just
| incredible.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but the sheer size of the ToC of the Mixing
| Swift and C++ page[1] makes me think I'm better off just learning
| and using C++.
|
| https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
| thought_alarm wrote:
| If that kind of complexity frightens you then you probably want
| to stay away from C++ entirely.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Quite frankly, this isn't even that large. There are entire
| _books_ about topics like JNI (Java <-> C) or Swig (Python <->
| C); this page is fairly short given the broad scope of Swift's
| C++ integration.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I've got no experience, but I imagine you don't have to
| interface with C++ too often, and when you do it's probably
| unlikely someone haven't written a wrapper library already.
| That's how the entire Python ecosystem works, either someone
| has made a wrapper, you make a wrapper or you use subprocess if
| the library has a CLI and you're not in a performance sensitive
| part of execution.
|
| Any language that makes programming easier is good. Modern C++
| is also quite good, but I feel like there are more "nice to
| haves" in other languages. Reflection is one, for serializing
| things without boilerplate and his uncle. And just reflecting
| on types in general can be nice.
| pier25 wrote:
| Anyone using Swift for web backend?
|
| I looked into Vapor but it seems much slower than it should be
| for a compiled language.
| open592 wrote:
| The speed is less correlated with the language it's implemented
| in, and more with the amount of man hours spent building and
| optimizing it.
|
| Vapor is a very small project, and thus is slower then other
| larger more mature projects.
| desertmonad wrote:
| I've used vapor as a side project API. For anything new and
| only on Apple ecosystem, its simpler to just go with SwiftData
| and CloudKit though.
| mdhb wrote:
| I just can't ever see Apple not treating developers like shit and
| it makes me want to have nothing to do with Swift.
| microsoftedging wrote:
| Eh. Google are the exact same. Pick your poison.
| mdhb wrote:
| They actually are not. Take a look at say the two most
| popular languages to come out of Google being Go and Dart...
| none of those communities ever really feel hard done by, the
| tooling is great, the documentation is amazing, it runs
| everywhere, it's fast, it's easy to work with, has excellent
| cross language interop and they are just generally well
| supported.
|
| I think you're just going on vibes here but it's kind of
| bullshit when you think about it for more than a moment.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Also the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly
| different. Android is much more pleasant to work with.
| Android Studio exists but you don't need to use it, unlike
| XCode. I'm very happy writing Android apps using vim and
| adb.
| fidotron wrote:
| People that have been around Dart long enough absolutely
| felt hard done by. That project burned so much community
| good will on the way to finally getting slight traction
| with Flutter.
| mdhb wrote:
| I'm actively a part of that community for the past 5
| years and I have zero idea what you're talking about.
| It's one of the most loved languages out there when you
| look at surveys of its users and for good reason.
| fidotron wrote:
| 5 years is not a long time in Dart. It first appeared in
| 2011.
| flakiness wrote:
| Kotlin, the Android language, isn't owned by Google. it's
| from Jetbrains. Picking Kotlin is one of a few great
| decisions Google has done for Android IMO.
| fuhsnn wrote:
| Even Chris Lattner was treated like shit by Swift core team,
| that was a shocking read to me:
| https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...
| fidotron wrote:
| That is truly awful, and does reflect badly on the
| stewardship of the project as a whole, which is a shame. It
| really is amazing how toxic programming language arguments
| become.
| brink wrote:
| Frustrating that you're being down-voted, because this is a
| very valid point.
| mdhb wrote:
| There is something incredibly weird about people associated
| with Apple. I don't know what it is but I think people are
| not wrong to describe it as a cult like mentality sometimes.
| But they notoriously do not like any criticism no matter how
| polite or how valid.
| brink wrote:
| I imagine that being within the thralls of a $3T company
| could be very comfortable.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Halfway through I thought you were describing Linux
| fanatics like myself, and so had to reread the comment a
| couple of times.
| frizlab wrote:
| Swift the language itself is incredibly good though.
| brink wrote:
| I love Indian food, but I still don't want to live in India.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Swift seems like a really nice language that's held back by it's
| association with Apple.
|
| Seems to hit a sweet spot of a fast/compiled (compared to
| Javascript), memory safe (compared to C++), object orientated
| (compared to Go) and easy to write (compared to Rust).
|
| Doesn't seem like there's any maintained bindings for Qt though,
| although there are some interesting ones for GTK (e.g.
| https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift)
| sedatk wrote:
| Swift also doesn't have a mark&sweep GC, and uses reference
| counting, which makes its memory footprint much smaller than
| GC-based runtimes.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| It also means it's easy to create reference cycles that never
| get deallocated. Especially in callback anonymous functions.
| tbojanin wrote:
| The tooling around finding these references cycles
| (Instruments) is 2nd to none imo.
| Onavo wrote:
| The issues it has around circular data structures is
| almost, though not quite, as bad as rust.
| steeleduncan wrote:
| True, but it only works on Apple systems, which makes
| Swift far less appealing on non-Apple systems. This adds
| weight to the point the GP comment makes about Swift
| being held back by its association with Apple
| dardeaup wrote:
| Agreed. However, if Jetbrains were to provide a Swift IDE
| that's free for non-commercial use...
| ninkendo wrote:
| [delayed]
| bobajeff wrote:
| My view is that languages don't matter only libraries and
| engines. If you want to make an iOS app then Swift is for you.
| If you want to make an Unreal Engine game then C++. If you want
| to make a website then JavaScript. If you want to play with
| Bevy or Servo libraries then Rust. If you want to play with
| Blender or do anything with AI then Python.
| mdhb wrote:
| I think that argument is on increasingly shaky ground these
| days as the barriers are starting to come down in a lot of
| ways.
|
| First in the sense of hand crafted interop solutions that
| modern languages provide.
|
| Take Dart for example as something that has a (by comparison)
| very small package ecosystem.
|
| However it has support for interop across: JavaScript, Java,
| Objective C, C, C++, Rust, Swift, Kotlin and Go I believe off
| the top of my head.
|
| Then you also have efforts like WebAssembly and specifically
| the in-development component model which seeks to totally
| break down that language specific package ecosystem and make
| importing and working with another language as easy as it is
| when importing a package from your own language ecosystem.
|
| So with those things in mind, however true that might be
| today, I don't think it's a strong argument moving forward.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| I don't think anyone cares about Apple here. Swift solved a
| problem that people outside iOS/macOS didn't have. Then it took
| ~10 years to make Swift more seriously general purpose and
| multi-platform, it's simply too late to be compelling when
| other languages have progressed too.
|
| Re: easy to write, I'm not sure, Swift's recent explosion in
| complexity makes it a hard sell vs Rust, even if the learning
| curve might be slightly less steep. At the end of the day,
| Rust's DX wins in almost every dimension, people are willing to
| learn slightly more complex semantics if it saves times
| everywhere else: tooling, libraries, build tool and package
| manager, ... I believe even compilation speeds don't compare
| favorably.
| mort96 wrote:
| Meh, I could've been curious about playing with Swift if it
| wasn't so Apple-centric. Just like I could've been curious
| about playing with C# if it wasn't so Microsoft-centric.
| mproud wrote:
| Is it that Apple made it and puts resources into it that
| makes it Apple-centric? If so, is that truly important?
| xeonmc wrote:
| I wonder why LLVM isn't also considered Apple-centric by
| the same thought process.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Of the opposite.. there's soo much hate against Apple and all
| their contributions. But somehow Google, Meta, annd Microsoft
| are better represented.
|
| Swift solves a problem that is still there. It was also
| released before the final release of Rust.
|
| It's just that people seem to think that because it's from
| Apple, it's only meant for iOS/macOS.
|
| I love swift, it combines so many things, and Apple is really
| good get pushing the language forward with its
| compilers/warnings.
|
| I'm also using it for shell scripts and small utils, and it's
| really great. I made https://github.com/jrz/container-shell
| to improve the experience of scripting cli tools in Swift.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I'm fairness, when Swift was first released it was
| basically Apple devices only. It took forever for
| Foundation to get ported to other platforms (and good luck
| writing anything useful without Foundation).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Swift seems like a really nice language that 's held back by
| it's association with Apple._
|
| Or empowered by its association with Apple. That's a pretty big
| pond.
|
| I like Swift, and I write software for Apple devices. I don't
| really care, whether or not it supports other platforms. For my
| backend work, I tend to use PHP, because there's a very broad
| base of servers that support it, it's good enough, fast enough,
| and, doggone it, people _like_ it...
|
| Another comment mentions that languages aren't really the
| issue, platforms are, and enumerates a number of application
| contexts, and the languages that are used to develop in those
| contexts.
|
| If you want to write native Apple software, then you need to
| either use ObjC, or Swift. You can use C or C++, and
| JavaScript, if you don't mind gluing them on, but native is
| Swift/ObjC, and Apple doesn't really do much to support ObjC
| (but they have to, anyway, because I guarantee that some of the
| biggest apps out there, still run with ObjC -including some
| Apple ones).
|
| I use Swift. I write both UIKit and SwiftUI, but find that
| UIKit is what I use to deliver a great user experience. I have
| to use SwiftUI, for a few applications (like Watch apps), and
| am constantly slamming into its limitations.
| esseph wrote:
| Given this comment, the next one that starts with something
| like "I don't think anybody cares about Apple here" made me
| giggle.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official post: https://www.swift.org/blog/redesigned-swift-org-
| is-now-live/
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| I would love to try Swift for things other than iOS if it had
| nice development tools. I don't ask for much. A decent LSP and
| code formatter are all I want. I refuse to use Xcode, so being
| able to code Swift in my code editor of preference would be
| great.
| OliverM wrote:
| It has both of those. I use them from Emacs comfortably.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'm not a Swiftie, but there's this if you're already on a Mac:
|
| https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/pixelfoundry/pixelfo...
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I think if you were already on a Mac and wanted to use Panic
| Nova, you'd be better off using Icaras:
|
| https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/panic/panic.Icarus/
|
| The one you linked to looks like it's just syntax
| highlighting; Icarus has that, but also has LSP, building,
| and debugging support.
| timsneath wrote:
| Good news! https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/swift
| runjake wrote:
| Concur. This is a pretty good setup.
|
| Caveat: I'm using Swift for command-line software.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Well since this is about the web site redesign, I'll leave my
| opinions on the language to myself and just say that I like the
| color gradients and how the trail of color coming off of the
| mascot bird acts as a separator as you scroll down the page.
|
| It's a fresh change from your typical modern website.
| fidotron wrote:
| The inclusion of "Embedded" on the front page when all the
| documents say it's experimental and not supported in public
| releases "yet" does make me curious if they will announce more at
| WWDC.
|
| The big hopes for me this year of WWDC would be a Swift port of
| the Foundation DB record layer, from Java, along with a decent
| http server package. It's underappreciated just how useful it is
| in golang having a production capable http server in the standard
| library.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I find it interesting the call out windows apps specifically, but
| not mac apps, and from what I understand, the new tools for
| compiling to Android are getting quite good.
|
| The last few days, I've been wondering if our commitment to
| building our mobile app in Swift was a mistake as the only member
| of our team that wrote swift is no longer with us.
|
| Has anyone got experience with Android apps written in Swift?
| Thoughts?
| ashvardanian wrote:
| > Swift is the only language that scales from embedded devices
| and kernels to apps and cloud infrastructure.
|
| Most people would disagree with this line...
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