@mycorrhiza it's semi-fair? there are annoying aspects like all of the documentation for the standard library being hosted on the apple developer website (instead of a dedicated swift site) and Xcode always being the first IDE to get new integrations for things like documentation generation

but the language itself is cross-platform and there is significant interest in Ubuntu support in particular for server-side things. the language community is pretty diverse and wants it to be usable in a number of environments for a great many more usecases than just apple-OS apps

i think the Apple investment both helps and hurts it in the sense that they can afford to pay some very skilled people to develop the language in good ways, but that also means that the development *priorities* are influenced by their wishes (even though the *process* is, i think, pretty open) and what gets merged is ultimately at those people's discretion

but i think the same is true for like, Go re: Google to a significant extent, so idk. somebody has to pay the developers to build the thing and they get to set the priorities for the thing. short of having a well-funded foundation driving development (and where is that foundation receiving its funding?) i think it's just kind of the state of programming languages right now

even JavaScript, which is standardized by an Ecma technical committee and not any corporation, and has multiple actively-developed interoperable implementations, one of which is developed by an open-source foundation [Mozilla] (which is probably the best situation you can hope for these days regarding language development), is not free of corporate politics. i long for a world in which other people (and not corporations) have the finances to do this kind of work but we also have to program in the world we're given :/