Why are you looking at a gift horse in the mouth? Apple is making the source open, is paying its staff to maintain the open-source repositories and shepard the development of the code, not all of which is directly in its interests other than to have a robust language for its use, work on the code for the compiler and supporting infrastructure in the open, and is allowing contributions outside developers choose to make in a controlled manner, through the evolution process.
If you want a roadmap for Swift itself, keep up on the evolution forum. And, for each planned release, there are goals that are established at the beginning of the cycle for that release, through the evolution process. Also, if you read the various manifestos on Swift.org, you'll get a general gist of where the direction of the language and infrastructure are going.
This process allows a lot of flexibility for the Apple and the community to adapt priorities to circumstances
The community is picking up ports to Windows, other Linux distributions besides Ubuntu, other operating systems.
What support do you want from Apple that Apple is not already giving?
This is not about moral expectations. Private companies generally do everything they do under the expectation that it will generate revenue (very rarely do they do something because of inherent goodwill); this is no different for Apple than for any other company (at least the way the world currently operates).
But of course, as developers choosing a technology, we have to do our own risk assessments. The case being made here is that in some critical markets, Swift is not the right choice because it doesn't look like a priority for Apple. This is a fair point and it warrants discussion.
As Chris Lattner among others laid out in that first thread, holding those patens and contributing them to the project works in favour of users not against them. Was there some issue with that argument?
I’ve only scanned through the thread now but I also remember when reading it at the time that the patent situation was a non-issue.
Apparently, all kinds of other programming languages are successful without resorting to such tactics; and if "the benefit of the community" really had been the major driver behind this, the patent could have been granted to some independent body tasked solely with the Swift language development and including non-Apple representatives. However, the patent was granted to Apple, as a private company.
Sorry, but this is just corporate BS, and I think a lot of developers see through that.
In any case, this issue has nothing to do with the stated topic at hand. I'm curious to read more about the differences and similarities between Rust and Swift - since I know almost nothing about Rust.
The patent is legally binding. The "it's for your own good" reasoning is not, at least not until Apple signs something explicit where they agree never to sue anybody e.g. for an alternative implementation of Swift (I think Microsoft did something similar with Mono). It's also worth noting that the thread linked above ended up inconclusive, with a lot of people hoping that Apple would clarify their stance towards independent Swift reimplementations specifically, which never happened.
But yes, that's been discussed in that other thread ad nauseam.
Okay. This thread has somewhat predictably turned into broad venting and speculation, and I'm going to shut it down.
In general, I'm not sure a broad "Swift vs. Rust" thread is a good idea. These sorts of language contrasts can be very interesting if done with a high level of insight into the projects' technical and strategic approaches. Unfortunately, a discussion thread is a poor venue for either developing or presenting that kind of work, and the failure state is not impressive. I don't anticipate allowing another thread like this.
We have several existing threads about the issues covered by the original post. Narrowly-tailored contrasts with other languages are on-topic for those discussions.
