this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
54 points (92.2% liked)
Programming
17424 readers
78 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Swift has little to no use outside the apple ecosystem, and even if you are currently using Apple, you have to consider your targets as well. Writing in Swift means your code will only be usable by other Apple users, which is canonically a rather small fraction of technology users. Rust on the other hand is multiplatform and super low level, there's very few other languages out there that can match the potential of applications of rust code. Thus you will, in time, be introduced to many other technologies as well, like AI/ML, low level programming, web, integrations between languages, IoT, those are only a few of all the possibilities. On the other hand, even if Swift has a much more mature ecosystem, it's still only good for creating UIs in all things Apple, which is pretty telling; Apple is not willing to put in the time and effort to open it's language to other fields, because it sees no value in them being the ones providing the tooling for other purposes. They pretty much only want people to code web apps for them, and Swift delivers just fine for that. So if your current purpose is making Apple UIs, you could learn Swift, but be warned that either you'll either be doing that your whole life or will eventually be forced to change languages again.
Then again, most languages nowadays aren't that different from each other. I can code in a truckload of languages, not because I actually spent time making something coherent and complete with each one of them, but because I know some underlying concepts that all programming languages follow, like OOP, or functional programming, and whatever those entail. If you learn those you will not be afraid to switch languages on a whim, because you'll know you can get familiar with any of them within a day.
Just a nit: swift is opensource and there is a swift ecosystem outside of apple UI things. Here's a swift http server that you can totally run on linux.
Swift only treats Apple OSes as first class citizens - even though technically you can use it on other platforms it's a painful and limited experience.