Yes, I understand that "This forum is meant for discussion about the language itself and its open source development". However, Swift is predominantly used for iOS/macOS development, and frameworks like SwiftUI/UIKit are almost as inseparably linked with Swift as Flutter is with Dart. There's already a 'Related Projects' category where we can discuss projects that are not part of Swift. Of course, if we want feedback directly from Apple themselves, we can use the less convenient Apple forums. But for discussions within the community, this forum is perfectly suited. I believe having a separate category would be much better than responding with 'Go to the Apple forum' every time someone asks something about SwiftUI/XCode, etc. We could simply add a note to the category stating, 'For official Apple feedback, please visit the Apple forums; for community responses, feel free to ask here.'
The authors of those related projects requested the use of these forums.
If they didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have it; and if they wanted us to redirect questions to a forum of their choosing, we would do so.
Apple doesn’t want it, and they do want us to redirect questions to their forums.
Thanks for clarifying. But what should I do in cases where I want to discuss something with the community, not Apple?
in general, it is impossible to prevent people from getting together and discussing something. for example, if you really wanted to, you could create an unofficial Apple frameworks forum and talk about Apple frameworks (unofficially) with other (unofficial) Apple framework enthusiasts there.
i’m not actually being facetious. we’re currently redirecting people with these questions to the Apple developer forums as a courtesy to Apple as a corporation. but there is nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from starting a new platform that does not extend that same courtesy to Apple. it might even spur us here on forums.swift.org to reevaluate a policy that has long seemed counterproductive to me.
As a relative newcomer, but daily reader of these forums I couldn't agree more with this take. Counterproductive is exactly the right term.
Create a sub-forum, let folks gather there and discuss. If you want to mute it, mute it. But ideally, some of those folks will end up contributing to the broader Swift community and everyone wins.
If blankly "Apple topics/frameworks were allowed", I think that would cascade into this forum being flooded with people asking us to debug their apps, problems with learning UIKit/SwiftUI, and, frankly, a lot of beginners asking how to make an app. To be clear, I do not discourage that kind of discussion at all - we were all beginners - but it has its own place on the interwebs.
I think what people want is: "How can Swift be used to enhance Apple frameworks and make developing an application for _OS better." That's very different than "How can I accomplish X in SwiftUI?". However I don't think that would be understood by most people posting and we would always have to paste our copypasta about redirecting to Apple's forums.
While we do have the many other project topics (ex: "How can we use Swift to make a server") and people can ask how to accomplish X in that project, the self-selecting user base is so small that it's manageable in these forums. I don't mind making a huge exception for the ecosystem that is Apple's frameworks and application development.
<tangent>
Frankly I think also a lot of people would get confused with Swift vs SwiftUI thinking they're the same thing (as I have faced this) so even just separating the forum-space at least helps with it a little bit.
I think the right solution would be to make Apple's forums more user-friendly and searchable, but not my circus not my monkeys.
</tangent>
Yes, it's possible to attract more people asking about 'how to make an app,' but these discussions would be organized into a special category, reducing irrelevant questions in other topics such as 'Using Swift'. Different sub-categories could separate broader ecosystem questions from specific 'help me' inquiries.