swift

According to https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/6d2a3bbf9d518c2ff8c63731... > The Swift language contains a number of features not part of the Hindley-Milner type system, including constrained polymorphic types and function overloading, which complicate the presentation and implementation somewhat. On the other hand, Swift limits the scope of type inference to a single expression or statement, for purely practical reasons: we expect that we can provide better performance and vastly better diagnostics when the problem is limited in scope. However Hindley-Milner systems are generally linear in complexity whereas Swift's type system experiences combinatorial complexity explosions in the presence of overloads and operators and literals.

> Rust and Swift are not really competing in the same space. Rust is trying competing yes, Swift is not trying to compete, they use it, they do what they have to do [1] What happened to Mozilla's Rust plan with Firefox? so far, no bueno > And nobody trusts Apple for cross-platform support. Swift supports a wide range of targets and architectures [2] They officially provide release build for all major OSs [3] [1] - https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/OwnershipManif... [2] - https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/aff7c14d92fd241aff85ba4c... [3] - https://www.swift.org/download/

Nether llvm nor clang are GPL, dual licensed or otherwise. They're Apache 2.0[1] (or formerly a quasi-MIT/X11 license[2]), as is swift[3]. The binaries of the compilers they release with the platform are also built with internal forks that have some differences with the public llvm/clang/swift trees and that wouldn't be possible with gpl. [1] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/LICENSE.... [2] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/7555c589af006c9c4d... [3] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

I can't comment on Apple frameworks but there's a @_specialize attribute which allows you to export a fixed set of pre-specialized entry points from your own frameworks, without exposing the entire function body as serialized SIL the way that @inlinable does, but it's still experimental and subject to breakage and change: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Generics.rst#s...

Thanks again, I'll keep reading. For posterity, another good resource (at least for Swift): https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/HowSwiftImport...

Apple's Swift source looks nice[0]. So does Darwin[1]. They have done a lot of work on structure and documentation, since the docs are auto-generated. I have taken a lot of inspiration from them. The Adobe APIs[2] were also excellent, but I'm not sure they are open for browsing, anymore. [0] https://github.com/apple/swift [1] https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu [2] https://developer.adobe.com/photoshop/api/

Like that says anything about anything? github.com/apple/swift has ~4000 open issues labeled as "bug" and has existed since 8 years ago. That makes about ~500 "bugs" per year while emacs by the same measure then have about ~75 bugs per year. Tell me again how awful that metric is compared to others?

Swift is entirely designed around value types and structs, and has a much more predictable ARC model instead of GC for game programming. Plus, an upcoming feature will add Rust-style lifetimes for more control (https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/OwnershipManif...).

Yes, I know C# reasonably well. I use it in Unity for game development, where it is the only option. C# is better than many alternatives, but Swift is simply a better language in every regard. C#'s GC is a constant issue for games, and it makes using things like LINQ nearly impossible since it does so much allocation. Swift is designed around automatic reference counting instead. C#'s structs work weirdly and are hard to use. Swift is so much more ergonomic. C# has added a few nice things lately, but it's much more verbose than Swift. Swift is also more focused on performance, and is always AOT compiled. Unity has had to come up with some insane things to get C# to work across platforms – they have their own .NET IL to C++ compiler (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html) that doesn't always work right. They also have a SECOND custom

Most of the performance critical sections are numeric computation loops. I use the Unsafe APIs where profiling shows that the bounds-checking overhead is significant. In principle, I could get rid of reference counting overhead by using value types or immutable data. I couldn't see a simple path to doing that without re-architecting everything (with no guarantee that the end result would not just have different performance issues.) For the moment, I'm awaiting compiler improvements before re-evaluating the tradeoffs. There is certainly room for the compiler to reason better on eliding retain/release. https://github.com/apple/swift/issues/58549 Yes, the code does use Accelerate where applicable. That is one component of the numeric evaluation. It addresses the lowest level of things like evaluate the sin function on every array element, or

There’s partial support which is under active development. https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/docs/CppInteroperab... https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-and-c-interoperability-work...

The obtuse part about github's linear view isn't that it's linear, it's that it's interleaved by time in ways that form a chaotic view even for a linear one. Like, picking a random large project for an example, take a look at swift's history on github[1]. Because there's a bunch of PRs that were being operated on in parallel, and some probably that are even kind of old, the view you wind up with is likely a large streak of "PR merged" commits and then all the commits from those PRs jumbled together in an incoherent mess. Likely you'd have to scroll a few pages to even find some of those PR's commits (Note: git-log also has this as its default order, but you have some choices like --topo-order). That said, I really really recommend you look at git's native --first-parent output, as I mentioned. That is likely the linear history you really

> It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth. There have been many PR/issues on github that were either very likely, or certainly submitted by trolls, that have been accepted. [1] Although nowadays it's common to see master/slave being replaced, back in 2015 it was not common, this one one of the first things that dropped that terminology. The fact that the user is called pcbro and has a picture of PC Principal from South Park, makes it somewhat likely that it was a troll. [2] I think based on the language used is almost 100% certainly a troll [1] https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165 [2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268