What’s new in Swift 6.2
257 comments
·May 9, 2025travisgriggs
elcritch
I feel the same. Apple software quality certainly hasn’t increased. Years back I remember some apps crashing suddenly after updating MacOS. I checked the binary and saw they’d started adding Swift.
Half a decade later it seems like it should be better and Swift stuff should be stabilized. But nope, I’ve had more little glitches in both iOS and MacOS. It’s hard to say it’s due to Swift, and not management priorities. Still it feels partially related to Swift.
Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design.
That and Swift de-emphasizes Obj-C message passing. I have a pet theory that message passing produces more robust GUI software that’s easier to adapt to complex needs.
ardit33
It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see advanced folks ditching UIKit anytime soon for advanced UI.
LudwigNagasena
Seems like another case of the general trend in software development of easy things becoming easier and hard things becoming harder.
interpol_p
I don't completely agree with you. Having used both SwiftUI and UIKit extensively, I value both of them and think they are both quite strong in different areas
I have published a word game written entirely in SwiftUI [1], the effects and animations would have been much more difficult to do in UIKit, and the app itself would have been hairier to write and maintain [2]. I also track crashes, and this particular app has had four crashes in the past year, so I am very pleased with the stability
That said, there are definitely times, as you say, where you have to drop to UIKit. For the word game mentioned above, I had to drop down to UIKit to observe low-level keyboard events in order to support hardware keyboard input without explicitly using a control that accepts text input
SwiftUI is mature, it's pretty advanced — especially for graphics and animation heavy UI. It has limitations, particularly around advanced input event handling, as well as the application/scene lifecycle
I plan to continue to use both UIKit and SwiftUI where they make sense. It's easy enough to bridge between them with UIHostingController and UIViewRepresentable
[2] Specific examples include: image and alpha masking is trivial in SwiftUI, Metal Shaders can be applied with a one-line modifier, gradients are easy and automatic, SwiftUI's Timeline+Canvas is very performant and more powerful than custom drawing with UIKit. Creating glows, textured text and images, blurs and geometry-based transitions is much easier in SwiftUI
krzat
What baffles me the most is testability of SwiftUI. It simply does not exist.
firecall
That’s a shame!
I haven’t used Swift UI in a couple of years, but I always thought the basics of it were excellent.
They got the declarative API foundations right I thought.
Shame it’s still flakey.
The preview used to crash constantly last time I used it.
cevn
I have a good bug right now. My wife bought a Macbook Air. I use High DPI and she does not. It is impossible to switch between users in this situation, one of the core functionalities of the computer is just broken. Makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses these computers..
eptcyka
No one tests multi-user functionality, afaict.
frizlab
That doesn’t mean much. Swift is new. Usable Swift even more so. All of the apps Apple propose have legacy. New apps from now (e.g. Invites) will be much more interesting.
rcruzeiro
> Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design.
This could not be furthest for the truth. The entire process of proposing a new language feature to getting it implemented and shipped is out in the open for everyone to participate/see.
elcritch
What’s that got to do with coherent language design? Just because it’s somewhat open doesn’t mean it has consistent design. Then by all accounts Apple just forced through language changes needed for SwiftUI.
msie
Too many cooks!
lenkite
Software written in a simpler language like Objective-C - verbose, fast to grok and fast to compile is actually more maintainable in the long run than a so-called "developer friendly", humongous, complex and slow-compilation language like Swift.
A lean language reduces the surface area for beautiful expressiveness by clever people - making sure the dumb/junior guy who is maintaining your project in the future can actually fully understand what is written. And it can build and run fast - so you can iterate and test out software behaviors fast.
No one in this world is immortal. If it takes too much time to grok code, write/compile/run tests - a developer will be disincentivized to do so, no matter how amazing the language features are.
My guess is that Swift has adversely affected Apple's overall software quality. As more software moved from Objective-C to Swift, quality has dropped precipitously.
interpol_p
It's easier to read and navigate a well-written Swift codebase than a well-written Objective-C codebase
Conversely, it's easier to debug an Objective-C app than a Swift app, simply because compiling and debugging is so much faster, and debugging so much more reliable
I don't know about a software quality drop being attributable to the migration to Swift. So many other things have also happened in that time — much more software that Apple produces is heavily reliant on network services, which they are not very good at. I find Apple's local-first software to be excellent (Final Cut Pro X, Logic, Keynote) and their network-first software is hit-or-miss
They have also saddled developers with a ton of APIs for working with their online services. Try to write correct and resilient application code that deals with files in iCloud? It's harder than it was to write an application that dealt with only local files a decade ago!
Swift is easy to blame, but I don't think it's responsible for poor software. Complexity is responsible for poor software, and we have so much more of that now days
zozbot234
There's a limit to how "lean" a safe, low-level language can be. Rust is leaner and simpler than Swift but not by much, and pretty much all of its outward features are "load bearing" to a far greater extent than Swift's.
(People have tried to come up with simpler languages that still preserve safety and low-level power, like Austral - but that simplicity comes at the cost of existing intuition for most devs.)
cosmic_cheese
As someone frequently flipping between Swift and Kotlin, while I don’t necessarily feel like Swift is massively superior, I often find myself thinking “why is this so quirky and pedantic” when writing Kotlin.
For example, I really really wish Kotlin would adopt Swift style if let/guard let statements. Kotlin smart casting doesn’t work just often enough to not be able to consistently rely on it and the foo?.let { } syntax is ugly.
Combined with the JVM warts of gradle and jankiness of code stripping and obfuscation, generally speaking if I could opt to use Swift in place of Kotlin for Android dev I would do so in a heartbeat.
joe_fishfish
Ha, I switch between the two as well, but I feel the opposite. Kotlin is much more intuitive for me, and Swift is more clunky. I do miss guard lets in Kotlin, but that’s about it.
dlachausse
cosmic_cheese
Skip tools is pretty cool and I very may well use it for at some point, but it works by translating Swift+SwiftUI to Kotlin+Compose and I’d prefer a more direct approach that lets me build Android binaries with Swift (preferably with the whole of UIKit available, though that’s not likely).
vips7L
The ?.let syntax is terrible. I don’t see how anyone thinks it’s better than doing a normal if != null check.
renewedrebecca
Feels like a lot of people like making dealing with null as complicated as possible.
cosmic_cheese
The only time I ever use it is when the if != null check doesn’t work (aforementioned smart cast failure) and I don’t feel like creating a local var to fix it.
ksec
I have been skeptical of Swift ever since I heard the original goal was the one language to rule them all from Assembly to Javascript. When something is too good to be true it probably is. But I have also given Apple plenty of benefits of doubt.
It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and framework to play around and work. It brings particular little if not negative user experience in terms of final products. I often wonder if Apple could just have some light touches of improvement on Objective-C in the past 10 - 12 years and instead focuses on actual OS and Apps quality.
It is this lack of focus that has been with Apple since Steve Jobs left.
zozbot234
> It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and framework to play around and work
You can have both. Rust feels "mature" and "finished" if you stick to the stable featureset, but it's still bringing compelling new features over time in spite of that. But this can only be achieved by carefully managing complexity and not letting it get out-of-hand with lots of ad-hoc special cases and tweaks.
saagarjha
Objective-C being stuck in the 1990s forever was not necessarily a good thing.
moltopoco
Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries, but without header files, raw pointers, and all the @messy @syntax. Add little goodies like auto-stringification of enums and so on. I think that kind of superficial cleanup would have been enough to modernize the language. They could have spent the rest of all the time that Swift has consumed on better dev tooling.
lenkite
Umm...Java is extremely conservative in adding new features. Not really sure you can compare to Swift that throws 10x the features in with every major release.
ab5tract
Also, if it hadn’t been (slowly) improving all this time then I would have defenestrated my work laptop, myself, or both long ago.
I’m trying to imagine using it without the stream API just shuts my entire brain down. Records arrived pretty recently and are already essential for me.
You will always have to pay me to program Java, but you’d have to pay me 5x my current salary to do it in Java 8 or earlier.
donatj
It's second system syndrome combined with the fact that Objective C and the NeXT underpinnings were put together by a team of truly the greatest minds of a generation.
Swift was put together by some great minds, and some minds, Apple still attracts talent, but in far lower density. This isn't even a jab, just from the fact that they are far larger and the talent pool is smaller with far more competition.
What percentage of genius level developers want to work for a company where they can't talk about their work and generally get zero public credit?
jmull
Good code is just one of many ingredients to great software, and programming language is a small factor in good code.
Swift was never going to make Apple software great (nor Go or Rust or anything else for anyone else).
Though, honestly, if you're thinking about computer languages in terms of cool, you're going in the wrong direction.
JimDabell
It’s easier to write more robust code with Swift, but if Apple don’t prioritise quality, the language can’t fix that.
panic
Swift wasn't designed to solve any of the problems Apple engineers had writing customer-facing software. It was a shiny new language which could be marketed to third parties as something modern and familiar, unlike Objective-C with its odd mix of C and square brackets.
w10-1
The article doesn’t give enough attention to the glacial but steady changes in the ownership model that will have great benefit in avoiding copies in value types, Swift’s strength and Achilles heel.
I have to say Paul Hudson has almost single-handedly taken over communicating the essentials of Swift to the world; he’s fantastically reliable, brief but enthusiastic, guiding people around the many pitfalls.
rockbruno
Agree on Paul Hudson being great, but not so much on the guiding around the pitfalls. One big issue with the Swift community in general in my opinion is that a lot of the community content is incredibly shallow. Most of them are fine with "there's this feature and you can do X with it, cool right?" style-content, meaning very few people actually take the time to explain what the trade-offs are / performance considerations / how things work under the hood, and IMO this took a huge negative hit in the average skill level of Swift developers.
saagarjha
I think one of the problems is that the people who are actually using the language features generally don't have time to do it, Apple doesn't do it themselves, and Paul Hudson has 300 new features a year to view. Plus, iOS developers cargo cult harder than any other programming community I've come across, and this generally doesn't work really well if your explanation is difficult to quickly convey.
strongpigeon
Agreed about Paul Hudson. He also just seems like a genuinely nice guy. I was kind of shocked to receive an email from him out of the blue last weekend (well, from GitHub, but with his name in the "From" field). Turns out it was about a PR [0] to one of my packages where he fixed typos in the README.
dkga
The last sentence is exactly how I would describe Paul Hudson, as a HwS reader/user.
sedatk
Free-form identifiers are neat for test-case naming, but not for `HTTPStatus.`404``. I think having `HTTPStatus.Error404` was a bad idea to begin with. Just use semantic names like `HTTPStatus.NotFound` and you wouldn't have a problem in the first place. Now, a single character typo can easily make a 404, 403 and create a bug. It's less of a problem with semantic names.
If you want constrained numeric types in Swift, that's another problem to tackle. But `HTTPStatus.`404`` seems to be the least ideal way to go about it. It lets you do stuff like to declare `HttpStatus.`404`` with a value of 403 too.
hombre_fatal
You might mess up 403 vs 401 in this system, but then in the next system you're messing up Unauthorized vs Forbidden.
It's like when you see a poisonous snake and can't remember if "red touches yellow" is paired with "deadly fellow" or "friendly fellow".
sedatk
Messing up Unauthorized vs Forbidden is a semantic problem, but 403 vs 401 can be either semantic or syntactical. It’s not like you’d mispress a key and get Forbidden instead of Unauthorized.
monkeyelite
> case _401 or case error401.
I'm not seeing why it's worth a whole language feature to avoid prefixing strange identifiers.
iamcalledrob
I think this is kind of indicative of the Swift approach: if in doubt, add language features that make code look nicer.
Not a fan personally, but Swift is littered with little "niceties" (complexities) like this.
sedatk
I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I find that example odd for sure.
Defletter
> Just use semantic names like `HTTPStatus.NotFound` and you wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
Have to disagree there: when I tried re-implementing a basic websocket server in multiple languages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43800784), I found it so frustrating when they'd insist on hiding the raw close-codes behind pretty names, because it meant having to stop what I was doing to jump into the documentation to figure out what pretty name they gave a particular close code.
All I wanted was to return 1003 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6455#section-7.4.1) if the websocket sent a string message, but:
- Dart calls this "unsupportedData" (https://api.dart.dev/stable/latest/dart-io/WebSocketStatus/u...)
- Java-Websocket calls this "REFUSE" (https://javadoc.io/doc/org.java-websocket/Java-WebSocket/lat...)
- Ktor calls this "CANNOT_ACCEPT" (https://api.ktor.io/ktor-shared/ktor-websockets/io.ktor.webs...)
And some others:
- .NET calls this "InvalidMessageType" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.net.webs...)
- libwebsockets calls this "LWS_CLOSE_STATUS_UNACCEPTABLE_OPCODE" (https://libwebsockets.org/lws-api-doc-main/html/group__wsclo...)
Just... why? Just call the thing 1003 and link to the spec.
sedatk
If you don’t want to deal with that, you can just use the number. Some APIs have integer overloads for that purpose, but you can also typecast. I don’t find HTTPStatus.`1003` more helpful than 1003.
Defletter
Many of the languages/platforms/libraries that I used (eg: Bun) do not provide any kind of named-constant for this reason: just type 1003. But the value of named constants is that you can attach documentation to them.
To clarify something I said earlier, I would rather have to stop what I'm doing to look at documentation (something that can be done within the IDE) than have to open up a browser and read through the specification to figure out what some magic-value means. Having a provided named-constant that tells me what 1003 means is very useful for me and for other maintainers or contributors to the project, and it can link to the spec for more information anyway. Just having raw magic-values is not great for maintenance. Likewise, having pretty names entirely detached from the actual close-code makes searching for places where that close-code is used much harder. Even just "1003_REFUSE" or "1003_CANNOT_ACCEPT" is so much better.
jshier
Yeah, the feature is mostly about test cases and macro generated code. The numeric property names are far less useful, as the good syntax requires tick marks: .`404`
DidYaWipe
Yeah, this feature seems wholly unnecessary and possibly dumb. The example given is ridiculous.
If you can't figure out what stripHTMLTagsFromString() does, you have way bigger problems than a lack of spaces.
finalfantasia
“Swift has turned into a gigantic, super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff…”
— Chris Lattner, 2024
viktorcode
As he mentioned in a forum post some years ago, Chris wanted the language to be more modular, but Apple's drive for adding features to it sets very different priorities.
To be fair, every new language version usually includes things that eliminate those special cases making writing the code more straightforward. Like the described support of functions in key paths, or the ability to set default global actor isolation.
aatd86
I wonder why the author left Go out of his list of examples of language stewardship.
singularity2001
how can the next great language avoid the trap of syntax bloat while providing the same extraordinary functionality
brainzap
By not providing them. Say "sorry, here is an ugly workaround, generate this xy code."
trevor-e
Lot of nice improvements here. I'm actually quite liking the async API after using it in a couple small apps and learning the fundamentals.
I really wish the entire Swift team would spend a quarter fixing bugs and improving the compiler speed, though. So many trivial SwiftUI cases trigger the "this is too complex for the compiler" errors which are so frustrating to fix.
catapps
I've been starting to use Swift again lately after like four years, and while the language is beautiful & the package management story is now a LOT better with SwiftPM, I found that none of it plays nicely with XCode, Simulator, or anything to do with iOS/macOS development -- its primary use-case!
I found myself awestruck that I *HAD* to use XCode or xcodebuild, and could not just run `swift build` and generate an iOS app.
In the end, I had to:
- compile the .app structure myself
- run codesign manually
- manage the simulator manually
- bundle xcAssets manually
- provide swift linker flags manually targeting the toolchain/sdk I needed
- manually copy an embedded.mobileprovision
It was a good learning experience, but what's the story here? Did Apple just give away Swift to the OSS community and then make no ongoing effort to integrate their platforms nicely into the non-xcode build tooling? Looking into https://github.com/stackotter/swift-bundler
seankit
The Swift language team has recently open sourced swift-build, and the community's assumption is that it was done in order to eventually move everything away from xcodebuild to swift-build, which would let you build an app from swift packages and fully break from Xcode: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-build
tough
yep can confirm swift build works, at least i was able to build a MacOS app and avoid Xcode at all costs thanks to it phew
singularity2001
yep Swift build Works magnificently but only for Mac so far
viktorcode
You are talking about the language but bringing up an example of creating an app for an Apple platform. Regardless of the language you will have to create app bundle structure, copy assets inside, add mobile provision and sign it.
If you ask me, those platform specific things should never be integrated part of the language.
catapps
Sure, but developing for Apple's platforms is Swift's primary use. I'd say Dart & Flutter is a fair comparison:
As flawed as they are in my eyes, its dev tooling quality is something I appreciate and wish I saw here. There are two CLIs, one for the language (Dart) and one for the framework (Flutter). Some would say that the CLI equivalent would be xcodebuild, but that depends on the complex .xcodeproj/.xcworkspace structure and still requires XCode to be installed.
marcellus23
I'm confused. You said "none if it plays nicely with Xcode" but then you complain about what the experience is like when not using Xcode.
catapps
As far as I could tell, if you create a Main.swift file, you can't just open that in XCode and start running it as an iOS/macOS application, and instead have to create a .xcodeproj/.xcworkspace through XCode, and add your Swift to the scaffolded project - this seems backwards to me.
(I then separately complained at all the steps it took to get it running without XCode, as I didn't want to be locked into using it)
marcellus23
Oh — actually you can create a Swift package and open it with Xcode. You don't need an explicit xcodeproj or xcworkspace.
realaleris149
Not op, but I think "doesn't play nicely" means does not work so you have to do it in other ways. This has been my experience as well, albeit it was couple of years ago.
jmull
It sure feels like Swift governance is broken.
They're just shoveling stuff in to the language.
Individually, most items aren't so bad, but collectively they've got a mess and it's getting bigger fast.
None of the decision-makers seem to have the sense or incentive to say "no" to anything.
It's sad, because the language had such promise and there are some really nice things in there.
Well, at least it's relatively easy to avoid or ignore.
myHNAccount123
> None of the decision-makers seem to have the sense or incentive to say "no" to anything.
How could you know that? Not all the 'no's show up as a proposal. The proposal template also has an "Impact on ABI" section which you can use to guide your "can I ignore it"-sense.
> It sure feels like Swift governance is broken.
What is the actual problem though? Not enough features that you would use? But I don't see how this is a governance problem
Java governance: slow at times but mostly sane. C++ governance: I won't even open this can of worms. Swift governance according to you: too many features I will ignore.
smotched
People like this just complain. Without pointing to anything real or saying anything meaningful. You just have to ignore them like spam.
tempaccount420
That's a matter of taste.
I enjoy "bloated" languages. Many languages are bloated nowadays, but the community agrees what set of features to use, what to avoid. Still, those rare features can be useful for stuff like making DSLs through clever use of the language.
It's much worse to have a minimal language that takes years to add new features, like how Go took over a decade to add generics.
monkeyelite
> InlineArray does not conform to either Sequence or Collection
Why not? Does this mean I need to make a struct which wraps InlineArray and implements Collection? Why didn't they do that?
EDIT: found the answer (I still have concerns):
> While we could conform to these protocols when the element is copyable, InlineArray is unlike Array in that there are no copy-on-write semantics; it is eagerly copied. Conforming to these protocols would potentially open doors to lots of implicit copies of the underlying InlineArray instance which could be problematic given the prevalence of generic collection algorithms and slicing behavior. To avoid this potential performance pitfall, we're explicitly not opting into conforming this type to Sequence or Collection.
adamwk
There’s a section in the proposal about this: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...
Tl;dr: Sequence and Collection are incompatible with noncopyable types and conditionally conforming when elements are copyable would result in too many implicit copies. They’re working on protocols to cover noncopyable collections such as this, which will probably have a similar API shape.
saghm
Interesting; if I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like Swift doesn't have a standard lazy iteration API yet? I would have guessed that it did if asked before reading this, but it's good to hear that they're already working on it. Since I feel super spoiled by lazy iterators in Rust, I'm super curious if anyone has more Swift experience and could chime in on if there are other language features or APIs that might illuminate why there wasn't as much of a need for this earlier; my general perception of Swift as an outsider is that it tends to have pretty well-thought out decisions based on factors that I just happen not to know about personally (e.g. compatibility with other parts of the Apple software ecosystem or different priorities due to the domains Swift is often used in compared to the type of stuff I work on personally).
adamwk
There are lazy collections, but they’re not default.
Why the protocols are designed the way they are is until very recently all types were implicitly copyable, but most of the collection types like array and dictionary were copy on write; so the copies were cheap. I think in general, though, there are a lot of performance footguns in the design, mainly around when copies aren’t cheap. The future protocols will hopefully rectify these performance issues.
nhojb
Swift is collapsing under the weight of its increasing complexity. So many, many special cases & they keep adding more!
As a developer it becomes so very hard to reason about code behaviour. This is especially true with concurrency, which was meant to simplify concurrent operations, but in actual fact is a nasty can of worms. In an effort to "hide the complexity" it just introduces a huge amount of unexpected & hard to grok behaviour. The new "immediate" Task behaviour & non-isolated async behaviours are good examples of this.
knighthack
Swift's become so feature-heavy, and complex, whilst the documentation is all over the place. That's not even counting things like SwiftUI, or its rather arcane CLI tooling.
Out of curiosity, I put in more than 150 genuine hours in 2024, trying to get deeply into Swift - and eventually just abandoned the language.
In comparison - I got very far experimenting with Go in the same amount of time.
Unless one needs to get into the Mac ecosystem, I see no reason why learning Swift should be necessary at all.
viktorcode
Spans and inline arrays are the two missing pieces of performance puzzle Swift needed. I'm super hyped for the release!
amichail
Do you try to put everything on the main actor to dramatically reduce your debugging time?
klabb3
I can’t speak to swift, but in experience with many other langs and runtimes I will say that single-threaded business logic by default is still the only sane choice even today. There are exceptions both on client and server side, but you get so incredibly far with one thread, while eliminating so many potential bugs, that it’s borderline whether parallelism should even be exposed to application developers at all.
Even in Go which has my favorite parallel concurrency model, there are many footguns and needless walking on eggshells for business logic. You can still offload IO and bespoke compute to other threads when it makes sense. This view isn’t a panacea, but damn close for the 99% of use cases.
Coincidentally I also think the early success of JavaScript an largely be attributed to single-threaded run-loop and callback-oriented concurrency. Even on the server JS is still holding strong with this limitation, and that’s despite all the other limitations and insanity of JS.
monkeyelite
Absolutely - the idea of threads haphazardly interacting, like 2002 Java, is a terrible default assumption for designing languages and libraries.
It's not even clear the perf gains are great. Everything locking all the time has killed a lot of performance.
trevor-e
Main actor by default is a decent strategy. It's usually pretty obvious when something needs to happen off the main actor.
favorited
Especially in apps, where most of the code will be about preparing the user interface and handling events. And it's relatively easy to make most lower-level components actor-agnostic – either by making them conform to Sendable, by making them actors, or by giving them their own internal synchronization.
Hashex129542
Apple effectively solves the problem which doesn't exists.
Before Swift 6, I've worked lot of unique projects both macOS and iOS and never spend time on debugging. I don't know what debugging time exactly?
hn-acct
Everything probably already is or should be
bsaul
Coding in both swift and rust is really a funny experience. It's like two roads being built going toward the same city, but starting from widely different places.
ak_111
which is better?
singularity2001
Swift started from beautiful syntax rust has ugly syntax
Swift is becoming more rust like but also safer
bsaul
i think i prefer swift as a language, and rust as an ecosystem. The amount of quality libraries in rust is astounding.
But that may change with swift getting more and more into safety and reaching the limits of how many keywords a language can have and remain descent. I honestly don't know what the feeling of learning swift would be like today.
And on the other hand, i don't see how the rust language can really get nicer without sacrificing on a few design decisions and goals (in order to keep the language extremely versatile).
viktorcode
The actual targets are very different. For Rust is to be memory safe and available at any level starting from embedded. For Swift it is to be readable.
Honest question. Not trying to troll. One of the pitches in the earlier days was “C/Objective-C OK, but you can’t write safe/next level code with it—-Swift will close that gap.”
N years later, it doesn’t feel like there has been a step change in Apple software quality; if anything Apple software feels less solid, and looks cool “look what I did” extension points. I mean, some of the tings you could do with runtime categories, and runtime prototypes were really cool. Now when I work on my 2 apps that originally happily port to Swift/UIKit, I’m just left confused with how to make things work. I’m happy when it finally works, and don’t ever try to improve the thing, it’s too much work.
There’s lots of different variables at play here; I’m not trying to stretch inference too much. Heck, it could have been that with adding Swift to the mix, the forces that have contributed to reduced quality in Apples stuff would be even worse.
I’m just frustrated. When I work in Elixir, I’m like this is cool. When I work in Kotlin, I don’t feel like “Apples got a language like this too, but it’s got that extra special zing that used to make stuff Apple touched cool.”