swift

In swift's case it's a single threaded frontend that is fairly inefficient: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/CompilerPerfor...

I didn't understand why the implementation wouldn't just do an atomic increment, but I guess Obj-C semantics provide too much magic to permit such a simple approach. The actual code, in addition to [presumably] not being inlined, does not seem easy to optimize at the hardware level: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main... The native Swift retain (swift_retain above) seems to be somewhere inside this mess: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/stdlib/public/runti...

> Android would not allow for developing in Xcode and Swift https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/xcode_plugin.html https://developer.android.com/studio/build/building-cmdline https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Android.md https://blog.readdle.com/why-we-use-swift-for-android-db449f... As you can see, it's a thing; hope this helps! > It's well known that the Play Store environment is pretty much horrific for the indie developer trying to make a buck. Yeah, Google Pay taking 30% per transaction isn't very helpful and some people choose to distribute their app outside of the Google Play Store to get around that on Android.

There are several ways to use Swift on Android. It's basically Swift <-> C interface <-JNI-> Java. The following links could be a good starting point for Swift on Android. [^1] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Android.md [^2] https://github.com/readdle/swift-android-toolchain

The choice may have been made because Swift doesn’t support meta programming well enough to do it well purely in a library. The plan they have/had (https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Differentiable...) claims “First-class language support for differentiation will enable convenient, extensible, and performant differentiable programming in Swift - more so than library-based approaches”.

As an iOS engineer, I'm a bit biased, but I'd still say it's currently not practical to learn it if you're not doing Apple development. That said, I love the language, and it's a big part of what motivates me to continue being an iOS engineer (I'm not sure I'd still be at if we had kept on with Objective-C). I would love to see server-side Swift take off, but the ecosystem is still fairly new, so any large project would require you to roll your own solutions more often that you would need to in other languages. I was also excited to see https://www.tensorflow.org/swift — Swift being used for ML. Swift is working on support for differential programming, which is a cool development in the space. More info here: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Differentiable... Perhaps eventually there will be enough applications outside of the

> It does address (partly) some of the issues with Swift threading. FWIW, this is among the first of quite a few concurrency improvements coming to Swift in the near future. Swift 6 is expected to include a real concurrency model, likely based on some combination of async/await and an actor model. The devs have been actively implementing a prototype [0], and the core team is expected to release a design document/proposal soon [1] [2]. [0]: https://github.com/apple/swift/pulls?q=concurrency [1]: https://forums.swift.org/t/rethinking-async/37984/30 [2]: https://forums.swift.org/t/rethinking-async/37984/51

Yesterday! Swifts build system can split off enough threads to consume all of your CPU cores, and batch mode did improve things, but it's not actually doing so efficiently. There is a trade off between total compute time used and number of threads used. In compute time consumed, swift is the most efficient when it's single threaded in WMO mode, but this means you can only compile in parallel with separate modules that don't depend on each other. And even then it's not a very fast compiling language itself, multithreading issues notwithstanding Maybe something has changed recently, but as far as Xcode 12 goes, I haven't noticed much of a difference. I last checked deeply with swift 4. More details here: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/CompilerPerf...

> Swift can interface with C++? I've just done some googling but I cannot find any documentation at all relating to C++ interop. It is not there yet but it is actually being implemented on a native level. A quick Google gave me this. [0] [1] [2] The approach is first-party than what you get with Rust's third-party crates and tools like bindgen, cxx, etc. Swift's C-interop approach is built-in and much more seamless and automated than bindgen's toggles and switches and creating them by hand in with cgo in Golang. [0] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/CppInteroper... [1] https://github.com/apple/swift/pulls?q=label%3A%22C%2B%2B+In... [2] https://forums.swift.org/t/manifesto-interoperability-betwee...

Here is one example, https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/63818 Alternative ideas, here are four, combining the productivity of automatic memory management with ownership, https://swift.org/blog/swift-5-exclusivity/ https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/OwnershipMan... https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in... "Linear Haskell", https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09756 In the context of Rust, maybe showing lifetimes graphically in an IDE would help productivity versus languages that offer automatic memory management alongside ownership.

Sure, several Swift https://swift.org/blog/swift-5-exclusivity/ https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/OwnershipMan... D https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in... Haskell https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/linear-types Chapel https://chapel-lang.org/docs/technotes/lifetimeChecking.html ParaSail https://adacore.github.io/ParaSail/ Ada/SPARK 2014 proposal https://www.adacore.com/uploads/techPapers/Safe-Dynamic-Memo... Pony https://tutorial.ponylang.io/reference-capabilities/referenc... Verona (very early stages) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-ver...