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.
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 ---
cosmic_cheese•20m ago
It’s not necessary to use all or even most of those features, though, and so a nice balance of expressiveness and functionality is possible. I’ll take it over dying on weird hills in language design in pursuit of ideological purity or mountains of ceremonial code and unavoidably ugly syntax.
bnchrch•1h ago
- 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/
jnrk•1h ago
troupo•41m ago
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 ---
cosmic_cheese•20m ago