Why Swift Is Not My Favourite Programming Language
Published at 22:44 on 7 February 2024
It’s the libraries, stupid.
The standard Swift library is laughably in-comprehensive. Things you can do in the standard libraries for Java, Python, PHP, C#, Ruby, and most other common modern programming languages just aren’t in there.
What you are supposed to do, from what I gather, is to use the Apple Foundation framework. There are several problems with that:
- The framework is a hot mess. It got its start back in the 1990’s as part of the NeXT operating system, and has been incrementally hacked on ever since. The documentation is likewise a mess: incomplete, cryptic, and poorly-organized. It is fully part of the pattern that Apple products tend to be as programmer-hostile as they are user-friendly.
- The framework is still incomplete. Support for tasks as basic as doing buffered reads from an arbitrary text file on a line-by-line basis are absent from it. (At least I think they are absent; review the part about the documentation being a hot mess above.)
- The framework is an Apple-only thing. There is an ongoing effort to open-source the Foundation framework so that Swift programs can be more portable, but it is a work in progress.
The bottom line is that Swift is not, in fact, the general-purpose programming language it is claimed to be. Unless one is writing native-mode GUI applications for Apple products, Swift really doesn’t make much sense.
It’s a shame, as the core Swift language looks to be fairly well-designed. It could be a great general-purpose programming language if only it came with a decent standard library. Alas, that’s a bit like saying Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln could have had an enjoyable evening at Ford’s Theatre if only that hadn’t happened.
I may eventually delve into Swift for such purposes, but as things currently stand, programming in Kotlin with the Java Swing platform allows me to develop GUI tools that run on my Mac, and I don’t have to deal with all the ugliness that is Apple’s native programming environment. Swing isn’t perfect, and its rough edges sometimes manifest, but it’s been good enough for my personal use.