After that, and IBM losing interest, Apple did hire a few competent people (including contributors to Netty and Akka) to build the Swift Server Workgroup.

But I don't know why I'd pick Swift on the server when Rust is better in almost every dimension, with a thriving and more community-driven ecosystem.

I think it's not about that but about dogfooding Swift on the server. Apple uses Go, Java etc for a lot of its server components and refused to invest in hiring people that would extend the ecosystem for server Swift.

Thats the problem.

It certainly doesn't help, but among big tech, Apple is not the only company where teams are siloed and independent. Microsoft has people writing Java or Go instead of C# too.

I assume the server side usage is not zero, but not enough to reach a critical mass, you're probably right there.

> Java 21 was just released and frameworks had no meaningful support for virtual threads whatsoever.

Spring was ready on day 1, as virtual threads had been an experimental feature since Java 19. Spring Boot added support within a couple months.

> In my experience, most companies using Java are chronically multiple versions behind (e.g. some of my friends still in the Java world are on 11).

And that's on you.

>> In my experience, most companies using Java are chronically multiple versions behind (e.g. some of my friends still in the Java world are on 11).

> And that's on you

What most companies do is on them?

> And that's on you.

Sorry I have to defend my pride here a little bit. When I joined my previous company, the entire company was on Java 8. When I left every app in every team there was up-to-date on the latest LTS release at the time, 17. I assisted many teams in upgrading their Java, Spring, etc, and inspired even more.

I would argue that I'm one of the last people who you could blame for most companies being many Java versions behind...

So what's the issue then? You'd be able to bring other teams to current versions of Java and frameworks, which have all been using virtual threads for the past 3 years.

Java LSP backends are basically headless Eclipse and NetBeans, they definitely go beyond syntactical errors.

There's also the upcoming Metals v2 that's using another compiler frontend optimized for performance, Google Turbine: https://metals-lsp.org

Actionable diagnostics for Java aren't implemented yet though.

Voting is definitely not a small domain in a direct democracy, and many Swiss citizens abroad don't receive paper ballots early enough to mail them back in time.

Provisional ballots work fine. Statistical inference works too.

We vote 4 times a year and it's not always easy for Swiss citizens abroad to receive and mail ballots back in time.

I feel like building for edge cases is the cause of many of our countries' problems.

It's 10% of the electorate - seems more than just an edge case.

> But somehow Kotlin managed to stay "not too complex", unlike Scala.

It's not really true anymore, Kotlin has slowly absorbed most of the same features and ideas even though they're sometimes pretty half-baked, and it's even less principled than the current Scala ecosystem. JetBrains also wants to make Kotlin target every platform under the sun.

At this point, the only notable difference are HKTs and Scala's metaprogramming abilities. Kotlin stuck to a compiler plugin exposing a standard interface (kotlinx.serialization) for compile-time codegen. Scala can do things like deriving an HTTP client from an OpenAPI specification on the fly, by the LSP backend.

> JetBrains also wants to make Kotlin target every platform under the sun

So did Scala long before. It's just that Kotlin got a lot more traction for different reasons.

Not to the same extent. Scala.JS and Kotlin.JS are somewhat comparable, other targets not so much. There was no serious attempt at making Scala target mobile devices, even during the window of opportunity with Scala on Android.

> even during the window of opportunity with Scala on Android.

I don't understand this. You can run any pure Java jar on Android, pretty sure you can do that with Scala too? It's not exactly a "different platform" in terms of programming language. Sure it needs tooling and specific libraries, but that's higher level than the programming language.

Jetbrains is doing interop with Swift (Kotlin -> ObjC -> Swift and more recently Kotlin -> C -> Swift), which Scala never did. But I don't really see how this is relevant in this conversation.

You can run Scala on Android and it's been done but it never worked well nor was given priority. Which is understandable as the commercial entities behind Scala already struggle to build the ecosystem and tooling in spaces where the language shines.

For instance the Android runtime has chronically lagged behind mainline JVM bytecode versions, iirc once Scala started to emit Java 8 bytecode, Android was stuck on Java 6.

Kotlin had other obvious advantages on Android like its thin standard library or the inlining of higher-order functions.

I work at a tech-adjacent company with no middle management and no, it sucks even more. The work doesn't disappear, it simply gets divided and spread out over a lot more people, many of those with no real executive power. I don't even think this saves my employer any money in the long run.

Most mid to high-end ranges from Android OEMs have a DisplayPort video output and basic keyboard plus mouse support. Pixels were late to the party, but it's been there for a long time otherwise.

The functionality used to be really barebones outside of Samsung DeX. Now it's a bit better since it's officially supported by Google.

My mom has had several generations of Galaxy A5x and basic iPads, it makes absolutely no difference. She simply never installs any app.

Some things are actually worse on the iOS side. It took years for Apple to catch up with spam and scam calls/SMS detection.

Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams, I eventually set up NextDNS on her devices.

> Plain Google search is still the main vector of scams

How incredibly sad this fact is. And even sadder all the second-level implications about how it got to this point. And then sadder still that there is unlikely anything done about it in the foreseeable future.

It's not like Western(-ish) nations have much of a choice here. As soon as your banks and financial system depend on the USD in any way, it comes with a mandatory dose of US imperialism and extraterritorial jurisdiction.

For people doing legitimate commerce this is a pro not a con.

And who defines legitimate? The same lunatics who regularly shit on international laws?

Yeah, I love how my legitimate foreign business that is solely owned and controlled by 2x legitimate foreign nationals with a legitimate foreign bank account has to supply documentation proving it's not American in order to prevent the IRS just unilaterally declaring it'll tax my account as if it was a US entity /s