It's a shame. I had high hopes at the beginning that S4TF - and the investment in Swift from Google - would help Swift break out of the iOS ghetto and cement it as a mainstream language.
Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value proposition. ML/data science is a great example where practitioners could benefit from a more grown-up type system than what Python has on offer, but would still be able to keep low level details at arms length.
I think Serverless would be another ideal use-case for Swift, where the productivity, clarity and correctness tools it offers would be a huge benefit.
Some very interesting things came out of the S4TF project - like the work on autodiff, and python interop. It's a shame the project never really seemed to get legs, it seems like it just languished for years with no clear direction.
These days I do most of my work in Rust, and I'm happy to do so because the tooling, community, and ecosystem is really amazing. But there are a lot of language concepts and features I miss from swift. I guess it goes to show that the governance and availability of a language have a lot more to do with adoption than the merits of the language itself.
Swift's a delightful language to use. It has a lot of the nice things about Rust's type system, but is a heck of a lot easier to use at the expense of a bit of performance. For a lot of use cases, I think this is a great value proposition. ML/data science is a great example where practitioners could benefit from a more grown-up type system than what Python has on offer, but would still be able to keep low level details at arms length.
I think Serverless would be another ideal use-case for Swift, where the productivity, clarity and correctness tools it offers would be a huge benefit.
Some very interesting things came out of the S4TF project - like the work on autodiff, and python interop. It's a shame the project never really seemed to get legs, it seems like it just languished for years with no clear direction.
These days I do most of my work in Rust, and I'm happy to do so because the tooling, community, and ecosystem is really amazing. But there are a lot of language concepts and features I miss from swift. I guess it goes to show that the governance and availability of a language have a lot more to do with adoption than the merits of the language itself.