Can you share some credible sources on "schools banning calculus"? Googling seems to primarily show up Quora and indeed HN discussions, and no actual policy proposal or news article.
As of very recently, the entire stdlib (i.e. "Foundation") is open source and available on all platforms Swift targets. For a while, the Linux builds had a much smaller/limited version of Foundation, but it's fully supported now.
I was looking for something that allows easy access to direct memory, with a syntax thats a little easier to explain than C. Frankly, zig was not actually a real viable option based on that syntax requirement but I still wanted to explore it.
I spent last week (with Opus, of course) porting the xv6-riscv teaching operating system to a bunch of different languages. Zig, Nim, LISP, and Swift.
The improvements in embedded Swift have definitely made it one of the most enjoyable/productive languages to work on the OS. I feel like I can build useful abstractions that wrap raw memory access and make the userland code feel very neat.
On the other hand, the compilation times are SO bad, that I'm really focusing on the Nim port anyway.
I really enjoy the ability to get started quickly with a known idea like “make a single user letterboxd clone” with a system prompt that explains my preferred tech stack. From there it’s relatively easy to start going in and being the tastemaker for the project.
I think people being able to build their own bespoke apps is a huge super power. Unfortunately I don’t think the tools today do a good job of teaching you how to think if you aren’t already a software engineer. Sonnet rarely grasps for an abstraction.
Nothing stopping someone from deciding to migrate VCSs (or even just repos) and all of a sudden end up in the place that 15 years of codebase history is squashed down to a single new starting commit. :(