"static nature of swift" remark

[ylluminate]

I appreciate your frankness (and I'm sure frustration) of your remark:

IMPORTANT! We don't see any way how to make web development as great as Ruby on Rails or Django with a very static nature of current Swift. We hope that things will change at some point and we will return to active development.

Could you please expound upon this and provide more reasoning as to how (and perhaps maybe why) this is the case? Personally I'm curious about how Swift has this lock-in when compared to Crystal (albeit Crystal is modeled after Ruby and I can see somewhat the difference). I'm just hoping to see things through your eyes better after working on this so diligently as you have and to understand the walls you hit more clearly.

[dziulius]

Crystal has very powerful macros which allow most things that you can achieve with ruby (except that those things need to happen during compile time). While swift has no macros, so you have pretty much no dynamic features.

[sauliusgrigaitis]

Thanks for question @ylluminate. As @dziulius mentioned Crystal has powerful macros. Swift is a very static language.

Modern frameworks leverage on language dynamism a lot. There is simply no such dynamic features in Swift. That's the main reason we stopped to work on Swifton. Actually, there is still no framework in Swift that is considered as an alternative to popular frameworks in other languages. Even iOS development is possible in Swift only because of Objective C.

[markmals]

Would @dynamicMemberLookup and/or @dynamicCallable change this at all?

[sauliusgrigaitis]

Thanks @markmals. Yes, it's early days of dynamism in Swift. Who knows maybe one day it will be very dynamic and very convenient for web development.

[WilliamDenniss]

Incidentally, both those proposals have been implemented now.