IMHO it's the best language I've used a significant amount, without a close second (where my sample size of extant languages is Swift, ObjC, Python, JS, TS, PHP, Java, Kotlin, C#, Haskell).

It's the only language I've used where I have never asked "but why?". Every language feature and stdlib API just does what it says and acts in the way that makes the most sense. You're basically forced to handle every case (null, any type of error, switch cases, etc). It's highly dynamic, yet code tends to stay understandable. Apple is thoughtful about naming things and designing APIs. It's the only language I almost never need to write utility functions for - generally the type you're operating on has a method to do what you want, which you can easily discover with auto completion. Strings are sequences of graphemes, not code units or code points, and their API reflects this.

It's not perfect, but nothing else comes as close. One of the most prominent complaints - compile time explosion - really only happens in contrived examples where you're using a bunch of literals in one expression, which isn't realistic.

However, it's stuck in a single ecosystem. And let's not talk about some of the newer frameworks. Oh, and Xcode is a joke.

    extension Sequence where Element: AdditiveArithmetic {
        func sum() -> Element { reduce(.zero, +) }
    }

I find it intriguing but have so far been unwilling to convince myself to give it a try on anything. It has a lot of good ideas, but I think Apple needs to relinquish more control over its future and direction for me to feel like a future plan change at Apple won't jeopardize its usefulness outside of Apple platforms. Presumably the reason why they want to keep it under their own organization is specifically so they can control their own destiny better, since Apple is heavily using Swift themselves; totally understandable, but trusting it for something that needs to be crossplatform in the long term seems potentially unwise.

It's not fool-proof either. Microsoft started the .NET Foundation, but that hasn't stopped them from causing drama by pushing self-serving decisions from the top-down. I don't really fear the same sort of behavior from Apple very much, but I definitely worry that Apple might eventually lose interest on the cross platform part for sure.

This is especially troubling because it is a fairly innovative language. If you get trapped on an unmaintained port of it, moving off of it seems like it might be hard. It's got a lot of clever ideas I haven't seen elsewhere.

It's a great language for Application-level software on a single platform (could be Linux).

It has some challenges that it needs to solve to do great as a cross platform "general-purpose" programming language.

It's paradoxically high level with its syntax and ergonomics but is tied down to the same cross platform headaches like in low level languages (e.g. cpp). Linking across cross platforms requires lots of careful thought and testing. Unlike cpp, it's not super portable. It requires a hefty 30 MB runtime for some features of the language to work. Try static executable hello world.

That being said, it's possible. You can build cross platform applications with Swift, but you'd still have some of the same kinds of portability issues like in cpp but with nicer syntax and ergonomics.

"Liking" is irrelevant to me. I do use it thoroughly though – I have written Linux containers (web apps) as well as native macOS and iOS apps. I am end-product creator and want my ideas to become end-user products and see the light of day. Delivery is everything.

Swift offers convincing ease for writing abstractions that underpin the app layer. You can be as clever or as simple as you wish, it's up to you. I prefer to keep it simple.

The other huge win for me is its ability to combine multiple language codebases at the SOURCE CODE LEVEL under a single project umbrella. Many of my projects use a mix of:

  - Swift
  - C++
  - C

The whole thing gets compiled from a bunch of source code folders with a single command. No wrappers or binary wrangling, simply call C++/C from Swift.

Compile time is really fast for me with Swift 6 onwards.

I use Xcode (and I am fine with it, it compiles really fast in year 2025) or VSCode (with Swift plugin) — both achieve the same thing in my experience.

Want to build a Docker Linux container? Very simple too. I fine tune and debug the project on dev macOS machine then use a Docker Linux container to build it for Linux (on a Mac or Linux) and deploy the binary. It's a single binary file by default, all libs inside. Then copy it to my NAS or deploy to remote Linux server and enjoy the speed.

Low friction, easy abstraction, fast delivery and binary machine code executable. That's what speaks to me.

Its popularity is steadily dropping over time since more and more people are moving to cross platform frameworks like Flutter.

Probably almost every developer working professionally on iOS uses Swift at this point.

I, personally, don't like it and I prefer Objective C. But I'm not professional iOS developer, so take my words with grain of salt.

There are Windows containers and I don't think that most developers using Docker on Windows are even aware of them.

IMO it's kind of good to have Linux as a unified container platform. It's easy to run Linux application in Windows or macOS VM. It's hard form the licensing perspective to run Windows VM and it's very hard to run macOS VM.