you don't need a reason... but i've not seen much good about the language, just a bunch of apple hype and hand forcing. just like obj-c which the mainstream community realised the flaws of 30 years ago when it was new... and now we have to live with as a necessary evil for the same class of 'reasons'. XD
Visual Studio can develop for iOS now (yes, you read that right), and Swift is a more pleasant alternative to Objective C.
This is probably more of a, "I'd rather use Visual Studio with my Swift project" instead of "I'd rather use Swift with my Visual Studio project." It's a very nice IDE, and Xcode is not quite as nice.
I don't know if this is included in your "Xcode is not quite as nice statement", but I have personally never had VStidio crash on me. Whenever I use Xcode, it seems like every third day or so something disasterous happens.
there is still a lot of pain in using visual studio for iOS.
its obviously the way forward though... i'd still not use swift for it predominantly if i can use a tiny layer of obj-c/swift to interface to sensible code written in C++ that works for every other platform too.
These are the 2 features I can't wait for in C# 7. Pattern matching and structural typing along with discriminated unions are pretty awesome. Like, I want the current C# type system, but with those things with it to forget about a bunch of boilerplate and odd problems that can pop up otherwise.
I can't find the tweet, but someone said something like "what do I think of swift? Seeing all of iOS using a language which has features normally reserved for functional languages is wonderful."
neither are of great benefit imo. they certainly don't allow me to do anything new... just enable me to do things with less work.
this is not a bad thing, and certainly is a good thing, but on its own its a tiny benefit compared to writing code that works on all platforms, and which compiles to very efficient use of instructions (i have ample experience removing swift and obj-c code as an optimisation strategy sadly).
I think that's because there weren't many Swift users who weren't already on board with the Apple hype train, for obvious reasons. I don't do iOS dev personally, so it's never seemed worth my time to learn, but it seemed like a cool language.
(By the way, I have done iOS dev in the past, and Objective-C has grown a lot under Apple's recent guidance from where it was 20 years ago. Again, if there were a free-software runtime supporting modern Objective-C -- last I checked, GNUstep was a bit out-of-date -- I might have considered it as an option for development on non-Apple platforms.)
Because it's actually a well designed language that's productive and modern?
In my opinion the only thing missing is better reflection (will get better), concurrency a la Go (they're considering), and async/await. There are a couple unfinished bits but the compiler tells you "X feature not implemented YET"
i strongly disagree with that sentiment. but there we go... i can certainly go into more detail if you would like, but the main thing for me is that it solves no problems that existing languages do not, and the generated code (i.e. instructions for the CPU) from using the abstractions provided are considerably worse for performance than if i abuse a language like C++ to achieve the same features.
this is damning of the quality of the compiler imo. now that its open source i might make some effort to help this... but it seems unlikely given the utter lack of motivation to use the language to begin with (a tiny thing layer of obj-c is all i need for now - i see no reason to change this - even in light of swift)
to me it seems like apple are solving a problem that doesn't exist because they choose to ignore established and well developed languages and tool chains.
