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It was pretty obvious when Swift 1.0 launched that it should’ve been called Swift 1.0 beta 1. Not a knock against anyone who worked on the project, other than senior management at Apple.

Speaking for myself, I didn’t add any Swift to any codebase I worked on until after 3.0 shipped because it was pretty clear that the language just wasn’t quite ready yet.

I’m genuinely surprised no one ever thought to just email Chris Lattner or invite him out for a drink to say ‘hey, confidentially between you and me we’re thinking about rewriting our app in your new language. Are there any other apps with this order of magnitude of LOC written in Swift yet?’



Large Swift apps are easy to find; companies would invariably use it as a marketing point on their engineering blog. Even if not, people open up apps all the time, any large app that uses Swift would be found and discussed.


Large Swift apps are easy to find

Sure, if they exist. I'm not talking about the world as it is today in December 2020 with Swift 5.3. I'm talking about 2016.


My point was that there was no need to ask Chris Lattner back in 2016: you could just look around the landscape and see that there were not many, as they would be easy to see if they did exist.


Lots of companies don’t speak publicly about their product strategies, like certain former employers of his.


As I mentioned, there is no need for a company to publicly post details of their products for people to figure out what languages they were written in.




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