Swift is coming, Swift is coming

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 21:20:41 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 November 2015 at 17:59:35 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Will be interesting to see how Swift does
>
> Considering it won't be available for Windows, I'd guess not 
> very well and it will remain a niche language until it does.

I think it's niche languages that are developed first on Windows, 
;) as there's a lot more money going towards new app development 
for iOS these days.  Popular mobile apps like Snapchat do not 
even bother developing for Windows _or_ the web (I just had to 
look that up, as I'd never use such an app, just what I'd heard 
from others ;) ), so that you cannot even _use_ them on Windows.  
Imagine that!

> There's a reason D shot up in popularity after it started to 
> support windows more thoroughly.

This is a common misconception, but D was initially developed and 
released _on_ Windows 15 years ago, as Walter is a Windows guy.  
It did not add linux support till a couple years later:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/changelog1.html#new063

Yes, Win64 support came later than linux/x64: blame Microsoft's 
closed toolchain and proprietary, undocumented formats for that.  
Perhaps they're learning their lesson with their recent 
open-sourcing of their CV/PDB debug format.

> Sure you can say that since it will be open source, people can 
> create Windows versions. But without Apple merging changes 
> upstream (which they have never said they would do) I really 
> don't see those efforts lasting long before people realize the 
> effort involved probably isn't worth it.

Yeah, I assumed they'd accept patches since they do for 
llvm/clang, and Swift comes from that umbrella rather than their 
other open-source projects that tend to just code dump 
occasionally.