On Saturday, 24 September 2022 at 11:24:11 UTC, Tejas wrote:
> What kind of requirements? They even have officially suppported Windows realeases now, no Apple-ism in sight, AFAICT
Maybe this is too much OT.
Swift was made open source a while ago and as a consequence of that is that people started to port it to other platforms. How much this is supported by Apple, I cannot say but probably not much. However, Apple probably don't mind as it makes the language more popular. When Apple develops Swift and its libraries in house they probably try to write it as portable as possible. The same is similar for C#, that its cross platform support really helps advance the popularity of the language.
When it comes to requirements, this is only my speculation. Language engineers are kind of peculiar people, at least about all I have met. It takes a high level of knowledge to develop languages and it turn this makes these persons to become stuck in their academic topics and forget that computer languages are made to be used by average SW developers. Apple hired a bunch of very skilled engineers, some from the Rust team which is obvious. In such organization there is a management to pull these engineers in ears to make the language user friendly and so that it appeals to the masses. You can clearly see it in Swift how they cleaned up the syntax compared to Rust and removed the explicit memory management. The question is how much that would have happened if they language engineers would have their own way.
In Apple there is a management to make "the customers are always right" versus "the language developer is always right". This is highly simplified of course.