as of Xcode 16, the default uses actual directories for folders instead of file references in the pbxproj file, which eliminates those annoying merge conflicts. at my work it took a bit of effort to move the project over to using folders but it was 100% worth it.

Swift concurrency used to be a bit rough around the edges, but since Swift 5.5 it uses async/await and structured concurrency, which has been a massive improvement. We also have built in ways to handle data races around mutable state with actors and the main thread with @MainActor.

Rust has a more explicit and strict approach to ownership/borrowing for sure, but I’d argue Swift has worked to be memory safe be default since the start, with ARC, no unchecked pointer arithmetic in normal code, etc. it’s still tightly coupled to Apple platforms, but the swiftlang teams has been hard at work changing that and I think it’s a fine language to start new projects with in 2025.

async/await is useful

But what Swift lacked (in my day) was any support for parallelism.

They wrapped `fork` in a lot of mumbo jumbo, but it was just `fork`

May as well use C

The Swift language team has recently open sourced swift-build, and the community's assumption is that it was done in order to eventually move everything away from xcodebuild to swift-build, which would let you build an app from swift packages and fully break from Xcode: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-build

yep can confirm swift build works, at least i was able to build a MacOS app and avoid Xcode at all costs thanks to it phew

yep Swift build Works magnificently but only for Mac so far

ohh gotcha, well hoping it gets linux/win support soon too, it's great!