Except several systems have been rewritten in Swift for Ventura, also mentioned in other talks.
Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.
It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic.
I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.
From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.
And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.
Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern
Execs: We’re all going to X!
Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]
Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.
Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.
Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.
To be fair, the developers at Microsoft went to town on it as well, adopting C# for parts of Windows Blackcomb, including the File Manager, the Desktop Manager, and (some of) WinFS. It turned into a fiasco and the .NET adoption was mostly dropped, as far as I remember, when they did the "reset" and pivoted to Vista.
Because the WinDev team sabotaged, the effort, instead of doing an Android or ChromeOS with everyone roaming into the same managed direction, they made sure they pretty Windows APIs would win..
So since Vista all new APIs follow Longhorn ideas, while using COM, followed by Windows Runtime, with the caveat that tooling is just as bad as before .NET was invented, but hey they are happy fellows on their little turf.
While there are parts of Swift that I like, I am more and more convinced as time goes on that Swift in general, and specific sub areas of Swift (like SwiftUI or Swift Charts) are destined to follow the trajectory of .NET as decried by Spolsky in How Microsoft Lost The API War [1]. To the extent this is true, it is likely smarter long term to avoid Swift except in cases where Apple has enforced its usage (like the watch).
For problem areas where Apple's frameworks provide a useful or necessary solution, accessing them from Objective-C instead of Swift is more stable. Examples like Accelerate, HealthKit, and StoreKit come to mind.
For problem areas where Apple has no advantage but you want to ship code there, oft derided but broadly usable solutions like C++ (which connects to Objective-C better than it does to Swift) or Javascript dominate.
Even Apple appears to struggle at drinking its own koolaid, given the recent criticism of the Settings port to SwiftUI. [2]
The more I use Swift, the more I miss Objective-C. I tend to like opinionated languages that take firm stances - all method calls are messages, everything really is an object, fail early, etc.
Swift seems to be more and more a kitchen sink language. Compile time linking, v-tables, and dynamic dispatch? Sure! There’s so much syntactic sugar masking seemingly unchangeable implementation details (throws/try/catch) and odd implementation choices (protocols associated types vs structs and classes generics). Builder methods are just plain weird, imho.
I had a lot of hope for Swift early on, but it seems like a rudderless ship.
Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.