I have heard great things about Swift but haven't spent a second looking into it because I assumed it's an Apple exclusive language - making it unsuitable for my use case of services deployed on Linux, developed from any OS.
To what extent, if any, is Swift exclusive to Apple devices?
Swift is backed by LLVM and Linux solid is pretty solid. The cross platform problem has always been the core libraries. Fortunately a pure Swift core foundation rewrite is underway. https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/
Looks like I may eventually give Swift a try once the rewrite is done! I've been watching Swift for a while now but I don't have a Mac so I haven't had a reason to try it.
Do you happen to have any idea about UI library support? Will UI still be Apple only?
I see no reason for Apple to ever make the UI stuff available on other platforms, I can’t see how that would benefit them.
But there’s nothing stopping other UI libraries from making Swift bindings.