Writing GNOME Apps with Swift
Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift’s closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability.
I've said it countless times, and I'll say it again:
Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
Things on the Linux GUI land are so messed up that we even got this. Well, at least with Swift and Adwaita for Swift we may get to something closer to stable, long term APIs and useful documentation...
If you looked at the original github link, you'll see that it has libadwaita (and naturally, gtk4) as a dependency.
This isn't fragmenting anything, and adwaita already has good documentation. This is just another binding for another language, not a whole new implementation.
Things on the Linux GUI land are so messed up that we even got this.
I don't understand what you mean by this. This project is using a library provided by a major DE, if anything this shows the opposite of your point.
There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode)
Both GNOME and KDE have a text editor that supports LSP's and plugins, similar to VS Code. I also don't know anybody who still uses Visual Studio or Xcode, outside a specific situations where they're needed, which isn't a positive in my book.
userland API documentation
Linux has XDG Desktop Portals, protocols that all DEs and compositors can implement and can be used by any app.
Have you tried developing a GUI app for Windows in the last 5 years? All the official first-party frameworks are either mostly deprecated (WPF, WinForms), or half-baked and despised by every developer I’ve talked to about them (MAUI).
Well WinUI is supposed to fix the mess caused by UWP and later on UWP that came from the Windows 8 era... WinUI is decent, at least it isn't lacking major features like the other two.
.NET MAUI is a very different thing... it's a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML. It's like Qt and obviously when we're talking about developing apps for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS with a single frameworks things are bound to be harder.
ew and ew
What if I'm writing for kde?
Then you already have a cross platform GUI Lib called QT, that said: good luck.
Are you suggesting that GTK is an inferior, not cross-platform toolkit? I'll have you know that GTK runs just fine on BSD (and maybe other things from Redmond), you uncultured swine!
Exactly my question.