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What can you build with Swift on FreeBSD which isn't easier with other languages?


Everything will be easier to build with Swift on FreeBSD for a Swift developer compared to any other language


Software that is meant to run on Apple platforms.


Swift on Apple and Swift on literally-everything-else are very different stories at the moment.


I'd bet a million dollars that it won't just be for the moment, but for all time


Not that different anymore, except Apple-proprietary frameworks (e.g. SwiftUI) are not available outside of Apple platforms.


This isn't to dispute your assertion, but I think things are still quite a bit different. A lot of things provided by Foundation on macOS are still not available in Linux's Foundation, nor CoreFoundation, so one has to defer to something like Glibc — which, then again, is not available to the static Linux distro. On Windows, it's useful to use WinSDK to do things that Foundation would normally do.

There's all sorts of little things that Swift on non-Apple platforms just don't have yet. Little footguns because the Swift rewrite of Foundation isn't quite equivalent yet.


It is getting close though, which was my point. Honestly I got bit recently by DateComponentFormatter that does not exists on Linux, but it’s been a while since I’ve had things like that. We even have (NS)AttributedStrings (including the NS version, which I did not expect…). Of course no fonts and co, but that’s AppKit/UIKit/SwiftUI, so it’s normal.


absolutely not




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