Official swift chat platform

Hey,

I think this is probably the best place for what I'm going to suggest, but mods: feel free to move it it if you think it fits better somewhere else.

I think that the swift community has grown immensely since the introduction of the forums, and it's clear that Apple is investing into growing the community. The forums are great for discussions that are longer and more in-depth, but I find them lacking for quick-questions, or general chat about swift.

I've been a member of the unofficial Swift discord server for a while now and it's a really good platform for this type of stuff. The vapor discord is a good example of a community chat working.

It's clear there's a place for an official discord/slack channel and I'd love to see this happen. IMO discord is better for these types of communities because of the unlimited message history, and easy invitations, but I don't suspect these limitations would exist for Apple.

There's #swift-lang on irc.freenode.net with several active members, ~140 currently online at the time of writing this.

Whilst chatting can be very helpful at times, I'd encourage you though to post questions/discussion/other topics here (or in the case of questions maybe on StackOverflow) where they can be saved and indexed for posterity helping others with the same issues/interests immensely.

I appreciate theres an IRC, but I think those unfortunately died ages ago; it's just inconvenient for most people to use.

I knew someone would reply with this and I agree to an extent. The thing is, chat platforms let you get help in real time, and people are more in a position to be able to help you with specific edge cases that only you're going to experience. Not to mention, question asking wouldn't necessarily be the biggest part of the community - just take a look at the vapor one to see how close the community is.

Chat platforms give you a completely new way to interact with people, that aren't present in forums or mailing lists.

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