<story><title>Chris Lattner left Swift core team</title><url>https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>Apple tried to do automatic GC but did so very badly and with a language not designed for it, so they had a bad experience and were scared away.&lt;p&gt;The modern GC in java is amazingly fast and with a few tricks likely to be good enough.</text></item><item><author>eropple</author><text>An Apple C# future is a neat idea, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure how you square that with the (IMO correct) observation that allocation control really matters for quality of experience on constrained platforms.&lt;p&gt;Obviously iOS platforms are much less constrained today, but not having to run a GC is a pretty nice thing.&lt;p&gt;Maybe C# could&amp;#x27;ve been extended into that universe (I know Midori had their own variant but don&amp;#x27;t know much about it) but it seems daunting to then make that compatible.</text></item><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>I think Swift was a strategic mistake mainly due to the niche effect, even if it&amp;#x27;s a better language.&lt;p&gt;It would have been much more productive to team up with the C# team as C# is a mature language, and a combined Apple + Microsoft would have been able to compete against java (esp. with Oracle as owner of java).</text></item><item><author>techdragon</author><text>Key takeaway for me was the note that it “definitely isn’t a community designed language”. This is telling, I’ve watched a lot of neat languages over the years and absolutely none of the ones without community involvement have grown beyond the sphere of influence of their primary companies.&lt;p&gt;I like swift enough I’m learning it to build my own personal tech nerd ideal podcast client because I own apple devices and want an app that works between macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS,and watchOS. but I doubt I’ll ever use it for anything beyond this one personally motivated project. Even if i release it as an app on the store for download or purchase I don’t know if I will ever be motivated enough to build anything else using it. Because the scope is too narrow. Business work is converging on open stacks like react, and angular, and the dark horse of C# with its latest release supporting WASM web components backed by GRPC-web and a C# function driven stack from front to back, even without SQL Server costs this is a compelling ecosystem backed by PostgreSQL and other completely open source tools.&lt;p&gt;But Swift remains Apple’s language for apple stuff and… while a profitable niche, it’s still a niche.&lt;p&gt;Edit: typo fix.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>richardwhiuk</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fairly convinced that GC is the reason that Android phones need much more RAM and much more CPU to generally be worse than Apple phones in terms of performance.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chris Lattner left Swift core team</title><url>https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>Apple tried to do automatic GC but did so very badly and with a language not designed for it, so they had a bad experience and were scared away.&lt;p&gt;The modern GC in java is amazingly fast and with a few tricks likely to be good enough.</text></item><item><author>eropple</author><text>An Apple C# future is a neat idea, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure how you square that with the (IMO correct) observation that allocation control really matters for quality of experience on constrained platforms.&lt;p&gt;Obviously iOS platforms are much less constrained today, but not having to run a GC is a pretty nice thing.&lt;p&gt;Maybe C# could&amp;#x27;ve been extended into that universe (I know Midori had their own variant but don&amp;#x27;t know much about it) but it seems daunting to then make that compatible.</text></item><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>I think Swift was a strategic mistake mainly due to the niche effect, even if it&amp;#x27;s a better language.&lt;p&gt;It would have been much more productive to team up with the C# team as C# is a mature language, and a combined Apple + Microsoft would have been able to compete against java (esp. with Oracle as owner of java).</text></item><item><author>techdragon</author><text>Key takeaway for me was the note that it “definitely isn’t a community designed language”. This is telling, I’ve watched a lot of neat languages over the years and absolutely none of the ones without community involvement have grown beyond the sphere of influence of their primary companies.&lt;p&gt;I like swift enough I’m learning it to build my own personal tech nerd ideal podcast client because I own apple devices and want an app that works between macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS,and watchOS. but I doubt I’ll ever use it for anything beyond this one personally motivated project. Even if i release it as an app on the store for download or purchase I don’t know if I will ever be motivated enough to build anything else using it. Because the scope is too narrow. Business work is converging on open stacks like react, and angular, and the dark horse of C# with its latest release supporting WASM web components backed by GRPC-web and a C# function driven stack from front to back, even without SQL Server costs this is a compelling ecosystem backed by PostgreSQL and other completely open source tools.&lt;p&gt;But Swift remains Apple’s language for apple stuff and… while a profitable niche, it’s still a niche.&lt;p&gt;Edit: typo fix.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m pretty familiar with the modern Java GCs, and they&amp;#x27;re very impressive, but at the same time having to do &lt;i&gt;manifestly less work&lt;/i&gt; with ARC is probably good for responsiveness and battery life.</text></comment>