HN Reader

Ignore the haters—Swift is an enjoyable and productive language that gives you a lot of advanced features if you want them, but lets you ignore them and almost treat it like a scripting language. Adding first-class wasm support could help it become a more reasonable choice for development outside the Apple platform.

Can we have a proper Windows support? i.e. with all the batteries/libraries included.

Interesting proposal though it does sound a bit too general. “Improve cross compilation”… current Swift tools are barely keeping it together for the “happy path” of building for Apple devices (it’s not that happy). It would be cool to expand into wasm/wasi as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of other desperately needed improvements.

Rust, Go and others have been building WASM 0.2 support for many years, they currently have a “just works” support for WASI. It would be a long time until Swift is even remotely ready for something like this and I don’t feel there is a burning need to have “yet another wasm platform”.

Can we have at least SOME form of JIT compilation for iOS? The technological limitations of not being able to use it are just ridiculous at this point.

And for no real reason, except that apparently Apple's whole ecosystem can crash and burn if somebody looks at it wrongly.

Is there a compelling reason to use Swift over Rust for anything other than Apple development in 2025?

I wish they had a vision for the language and not "we throw everything and the kitchen sink at it so that our compiler often cannot handle even the simplest SwiftUI components and takes ages to do anything"

Hopefully they make interface types available to the runtime. So you can read/write wasm struct properties from the host without all the usual glue code cancer

Just what I've been waiting for! Now about that JVM support for Swift...?