Sure, but "working code" written in C is declining. So some choices are being made.
It fits in line with how I've seen Apple developers at conferences highlighting the memory safety aspects of Swift. They are maybe hoping to position it as a competitor to Rust on that front. I wonder how they feel Objective-C compares from a safety perspective compared to Swift. I wonder if that might influence decisions on what kind of stuff gets re-written in Swift.
I hope we can see further graphs like this to track what happens. I don't feel MS ever committed to C# in this way but that is due to ignorance at the numbers. I would love to see all of that data for Windows and even macOS.
In the recent talk about the new Swift to C++ bidirectional bridge [1] the presenter from Apple says that they intend to eventually use Swift for basically all their first-party code from embedded code on microcontrollers, to the kernel, libraries and apps.
There will be language subsets for embedded and kernel development, not all features would be able to be used at the lower levels.
It was Lattner’s vision, a language that would scale from scripts to kernel. Oh yeah, and one that’s easy for a beginner to learn.
I think that’s impossible, Swift should try to be a great language for building Mac/iOS apps and hopefully frameworks.
But what do I know. I wouldn’t think writing a new industry grade C++ compiler in a modular architecture would be feasible. Just use GCC. And yet here we are with clang and LLVM.
He’s the only reason we are paying attention to Mojo. I have more faith in Mojo being a fast Python than in Swift being an all encompassing multi-platform language.
Additionally, until very recently, there was no (practical) way to reach the performance potential of manual memory management in pure Swift: all heap management was done via Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). A series of "ownership" features have been getting integrated into the most recent versions of the language that let you avoid that runtime cost while retaining memory safety (at the expense of more complex code — the vast majority of code should still use ARC). That makes Swift much more suitable for lots of "systems programming" than it was just a few months ago. https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5.9-released/#ownership
It fits in line with how I've seen Apple developers at conferences highlighting the memory safety aspects of Swift. They are maybe hoping to position it as a competitor to Rust on that front. I wonder how they feel Objective-C compares from a safety perspective compared to Swift. I wonder if that might influence decisions on what kind of stuff gets re-written in Swift.
I hope we can see further graphs like this to track what happens. I don't feel MS ever committed to C# in this way but that is due to ignorance at the numbers. I would love to see all of that data for Windows and even macOS.