I'm pretty surprised to see that the general sentiment is that SwiftUI questions are unwelcome here on the Swift forum.
If I've understood correctly the reasoning is that it's considered most useful to keep the entire Swift Forums purely dedicated to discussion that impacts the compiler itself.
Why then do we have a "Using Swift" category with this description?
This area is intended for users to get help with or ask questions about Swift or its related tools. Beginner questions welcome!
This category is not for discussion about work being done to the language itself.
Why can't the desired isolation of discussion about "the language itself" be achieved using the standard features that we already have (i.e., Categories)?
Isn't the existence of the "Using Swift" category (with its exact description) in combination with the fact that SwiftUI is a very common starting point for new Swift developers basically an implicit endorsement of SwiftUI questions within that category?
I personally prefer to have fewer accounts, and also I quite like this forum format, so I would love to be able to engage in SwiftUI discussion here. Can't the core language people just choose not to browse the SwiftUI category?
There are plenty of on-topic questions for Using Swift that are fundamentally about how Swift works rather than the specifics of a particular framework that presents a Swift interface. The current description could perhaps be narrowed to be clearer about what "related tools" means, but there is absolutely plenty to discuss in Using Swift without SwiftUI questions.
This is not the full story. Some people have offered this as a reason why it's good that these forums not be used for general SwiftUI support, but the backdrop of all this is that Apple has specifically asked that questions pertaining to their proprietary frameworks be directed to the Apple Developer Forums. Also re-upping John's response from a prior thread:
As Karl mentioned, these forums are not likely to be the best place to request a change in policy with regards to SwiftUI, because that policy is based on a request that comes from outside the Swift project. One could argue that we ought to disregard such requests from project maintainers, but I wouldn't expect that proposal to gain much traction.
I see, well I suppose that settles that then. I just went to have a look at the Apple Developer Forums and I see that there seems to be less robust markdown support and a generally less appealing aesthetic (although a part of that perception may simply be due to my familiarity with the Swift Forums), which I write here just in case it could have any influence on this policy, which seem to me to weaken the Swift ecosystem more than it helps it.
This is the sentiment that doesn't make much sense to me toward which my post was mostly directed.
I know that there's plenty else that can also be reasonably discussed in that category based on its description. My point is just that since we have a category here on this Apple-endorsed forum whose express purpose is to invite "beginner questions" about "Swift or its related tools", it seems to me like a negative policy to go case by case actively discouraging questions related specifically to SwiftUI after they've been posted. Even at high levels it's not always clear when one has crossed the line into SwiftUI (e.g., "Is this cryptic error message because I'm misunderstanding something about SwiftUI, or because I'm misunderstanding something about result builders?"), and I think that a beginner might not even be clear that Swift and SwiftUI aren't the same thing.
Therefore, I'm just intending to voice my opinion that the ban on specifically SwiftUI-related questions may have a negative impact on the general feeling of accessibility of these forums, rather than just the (presumably) intended impact of leaving all discussion that isn't SwiftUI-related happy and intact on this forum and funneling to the Apple Developer Forums all discussion that is SwiftUI-related such that it is happy and intact over there.
I'm not seeking any justifications or explanations from anyone here now that I know that it's a decree from high up. I don't know to what extent the policy is influenceable by the people reading this thread, but since it seems possible that it's a non-zero extent I thought I'd bother to write this down.
P.S. One data point: for me it turned out the other day that StackOverflow is the runner-up SwiftUI question forum (and not the Apple Developer Forums) as evidenced by the fact that when I had a SwiftUI question I ended up asking it over there after considering posting it here and then remembering that as far as I understand it is more or less against the rules here. I'm sure I'm not the only one who will default to StackOverflow when a question is disallowed on the Swift forums.
For me, the situation feels quite odd: SwiftUI is deeply entwined with the language and had significant impact on its current feature set (please do not try to convince me that stuff like result builders exists for unrelated reasons) â but you shall not talk about this driving force of Swift evolution here?
It is up to Apple to decide what is discussed in their forums, but itâs obviously a fight against their customers (at least some of them).
There was a time where I saw a real perspective for Swift to become a truly universal language which flourishes on a multitude of platforms, but even if that is still a goal, an artificial separation of language and framework wonât be enough to reach that state.
Discussing SwiftUI as a use case for Swift evolution proposals is absolutely on topicâSwiftUI has been brought up plenty of times in the context of the Observation proposal. The off-topic-ness of SwiftUI should (AIUI) be narrowly construed to, basically, questions for asking for SwiftUI technical support.
It would be soo easy: Add another category "Using SwiftUI" directly below "Using Swift". Any SwiftUI technical support question elsewhere could just be moved by a forum admin to this category. Everyone is happy - SwiftUI questions finally have a place to be discussed, and the other discussions could be free of it.
It would also mean that the Swift forums would be overrun with questions about an Apple framework, cementing the impression that Swift is "that iOS language".
If there were a "Using SwiftUI" category - then how would all the other forums/categories overrun with SwiftUI questions?
Au contraire - by moving all SwiftUI questions from all the other forums/categories into that single one, the impression that Swift is an Apple thing would be smaller than now.
Would that category be hidden so that when you go to forums.swift.org and are presented with an overview of new topics, no SwiftUI topics would show up?