How well is Swift Evolution working?

Recorded April 9th 2020 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

How do you think Evolution itself, the process is working? Does it engage people fairly? Are the forums welcoming and supporting and going the right direction?

Daniel Steinberg: It's interesting. I don't know if you've noticed, but in the early days, there was a certain group of people whose names you recognized a lot and it looks like some of them are here still, but a new group has sort of coming with new energy and is contributing a lot. And that's the nature of this sort of thing. So it is changing. I think the forum is a different field than the newsletters.

“A new group has sort of coming with new energy and is contributing a lot. And that's the nature of this sort of thing.”

I think that Apple would do well to have a homepage for Swift the same way we did for Java, with someone who is an editor pushing things forward. It's harder to discover things. And so having community and bringing the community in to know when something's being discussed, if you think back to last year, the community also freaked out over function builders. It's like, “you didn't ask us first and now you're just putting this in.” And so they withdrew it, and they worked on it.

There are things that Apple is going to have to do to move things ahead without involving the community and I think they've been generally a very good steward of Swift as open-source. I think they've done a good job, especially for Apple. It's so foreign to who they are as a company. I don't know how you feel, I think they've done a good job.

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