81–90 of 402 posts
I was in a line once at WWDC in 2011. I happened to be in front of a group of Apple engineers. I overheard them discussing a rumored functional-ish language that Apple was to switch to from Obj-C. They didn't know what it was but they seemed skeptical that it would ever be put into real use. Glad to see it only took 11 years for it to permeate down to the Foundation framework. :)
These sorts of statements in the industry always make me ask, "So did you guys make something terribly slow first, and then bring performance back close to where it originally was?"
I'm not sure if the current Calendar app was ported to Swift, was originally Objective-C based, and such efforts to move Foundation to Swift will just... make Calendar fast again?
Also, Calendar doesn't seem to be particularly slow in the first place. But I love performance engineering, and quality of life is big, so... hey cool.
> A reimplementation of Calendar in Swift is 1.5x to 18x as fast as the C one (calling from Swift in various synthetic benchmarks like creation, date calculation). These sorts of statements in the industry always make me ask, "So did you guys make something terribly slow first, and then bring performance back close to where it originally was?" I'm not sure if the current Calendar app was ported to Swift, was original…
They’re talking about the Calendar class in Foundation.
Similar post by Michael Tsai with some quick summary points of the impact of this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/12/12/the-swifty-future-of-foun...
Thanks for that, always appreciaet Tsai's perspective and this part stuck out to me: >it sounds like the plan is to rewrite it in Swift and extend Swift to allow Objective-C to call the Swift implementation of the old API
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you compare Swift with Kotlin in terms of being a good stand-in for high-level Rust? I've not paid attention to Kotlin in a while, but it seems like there's more progress at supporting Kotlin across more platforms (Kotlin native, web?, etc). I'm curious if people feel that the language features and design are at about parity, or if one is significantly stronger/weaker.
Another scenario where an often missed and underrated choice would be C#. Nowadays it runs everywhere and supports a variety of deployment targets (relying on local runtime, packaging it together into a single somewhat compact binary, natively compiling the code (NativeAOT, it's good but has some limitations) or mixing and matching all of the above). It is also one of the best high-level languages to write performanc…
And while it's tangential, Xaml drives me absolutely bonkers. It's like the worst parts of iOS Storyboards and Android Framework XML layouts except there's no escape hatch for those looking to build a UI in pure code (Android Framework is a bit of an offender here too, but Jetpack Compose looks to remedy that).
I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.
How would you compare Swift with Kotlin in terms of being a good stand-in for high-level Rust? I've not paid attention to Kotlin in a while, but it seems like there's more progress at supporting Kotlin across more platforms (Kotlin native, web?, etc). I'm curious if people feel that the language features and design are at about parity, or if one is significantly stronger/weaker.
That said I've only used Kotlin in the context of Android development. It might be nicer elsewhere.
I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.
I don't know if you can write high-throughput systems with 100% reference counted GC. Swift is targeted at UI work pretty hard.
Could someone please explain what exactly is the “Foundation”?
There seems to be a trend here.
So apple seems to be dropping c like languages, Microsoft says new stuff should not be written in c like languages anymore, and google has steadily worked towards using rust and go in place of c and c++ where it makes sense to do so it seems. There seems to be a trend here.
Microsoft is dropping C#? Source for that?