Replying to Zigg

Yes, Android has been natively Java since before Google acquired it. The reason they haven't refactored Android to use Go, is because despite Go having a passionate community, Go is only intended to be a language for text-processing, to accelerate the search engine. Nothing more, nothing less, which is also why frameworks based on JavaScript and Python still dominate web app server market shares.

Relating to Go not really intending to be a general-purpose language, look into Carbon-language. It is supposed be their developed general-purpose programming language, as many probably think of Go, to succeed C++ in the future. Not many people know about it, and it will be a bombshell on the whole tech industry when it is finalized.

Anyway, thank fuck that Swift hasn't caught on outside of Apple, because even with Android using Java, Oracle (owner of Java) was up their ass 24/7 with lawsuits. Now, imagine Apple's reaction to someone trying to use Swift as the native language to create some kind of development environment outside of the Apple environment. Come to think of it, their possible reaction is probably why nobody has tried! It would be an all around waste of time.
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graycat 2y ago

I didn’t know about Carbon; that’s interesting.

Go is a general-purpose programming language; just ask Rob Pike. I’d summarize it as C-like without C’s quirks, but with garbage collection and better support for concurrency.

As for Swift, it’s been open source since 2015, along with its standard library (the point of contention in Oracle vs. Google). You can get it for Windows and Linux.

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Zigg 2y ago

I can run Swift compilers on Linux and Windows. But then, when it's time to publish a mobile app to the Apple store, I need to sign the app for the app store. To do that requires Xcode, exclusively available on MacOS.

Theoretically, I can suck it up and set up a virtual machine to run MacOS, just so I can sign my app and get it published. But after that, a year passes, and I have to pay the annual reoccuring developer account fee *again*, just to keep my ad-free, non-profit passion project apps on the store, for the accessibility of phones that I don't even use.