Func return elision and subjective feedback

[Karl]

@scanon

This is a really important point. Swift is not a democracy ,¹ and it's a fundamental mistake to operate from the assumption that it is. The core team makes the decisions, with advice from S-E.

This is one of the reasons I rarely participate in SE reviews these days. The core team seem to want to have their cake and eat it - i.e. having a superficially 'open' process to lend credibility to the language, but also treating the process like a formality and not really as a mechanism to gather useful, high-quality feedback.

Sometimes we get asked for our opinions:

@John_McCall

However, as a frequent review manager, I'd like to encourage people who do have an opinion about a proposal to always write at least some formal feedback on it; even something as basic as a "+1" in the review thread provides a much clearer signal than, say, clicking on the review post, or only commenting in the thread to try to answer objections raised by other people's reviews.

But then, high-impact features like property delegates move from pitch to review in less than a month, reviews only last for 7 days (is it really possible to review big changes, like how we expose opaque types, in such a short time?) and sometimes there are several important reviews going on in parallel. Many recent proposals have changed several times during the review itself, making it hard to follow what you are supposed to be considering, and some of them just punt design decisions entirely to the core team (at which point nobody has a chance to argue them).

We in the community try our best to improve the Swift language and share our experience, but under such circumstances I'm not sure how we are supposed to deliver high-quality feedback, and given the ability of Apple developers and core-team members to stretch and bend what few rules and procedures we have, it very often does not feel worth the struggle.

All of this is to the detriment of the language. How can my company realistically decide to build its new server backend using Swift? How can I argue that it's worth retraining engineers in Swift? Or that it is worth favouring hires with Swift experience, when the language changes this way?

Swift is open-source, but it increasingly feels like it is not community-driven. It is understandable that the original core team was dominated by Apple employees, but I feel that situation is increasingly becoming untenable.

Just MHO.