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Swift is a more convenient Rust

blog.namangoel.com

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Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#121

Post by zozbot234 »

benreesman wrote: post #101
the_duke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should every language occupy the same design space? Rust was shaped by Mozilla wanting a language to replace parts of Firefox with. A language that is low-level enough to give very high performance, enforces correctness through the type system, and yet has many abstractions so it feels modern and convenient to use. Rust doesn't have any automatic allocations. You can wrap every type in `Arc >` and treat it like a…

I think Rust is cool! If it wasn’t actively seeking world domination I’d be like, cool let’s use that sometimes. Rust is so hell bent on a Rust monoculture ranging from stuff like TRACTOR to actively opposing interop that a few of us who know our shit have to be like “easy now” once in a while. I’m trying to decide between tiktoken and sentencepiece for a new vocabulary at the moment, and it would be easier in some w…

> to actively opposing interop

Rust just uses the C ABI for interop (including interop with Rust code that might not be part of the same build, such as dynamically-linked program objects). So you just have to come up with a plain C API for the interface and write wrappers on both sides of the divide that reference the C API. There are crates that will help with this, even achieving something like a "stable ABI" for Rust interop.

(And we'll probably see some work into interop with Swift itself (which has a stable ABI of its own) once there's enough interest in that as a memory safe language.)

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#122

Post by shakow »

arghwhat wrote: post #24
noelwelsh wrote: post #13

Hmmm...I disagree with a number of statements in the post but I think the following two hypotheses will make for more interesting discussion than some nitpicks: 1. A large part of why many people love Rust is that it's the first time they've used an ML family language. One of the innovations of Rust was to create a community that felt like home to Unix hackers who weren't programming language nerds. 2. Rust is the fi…

> Rust is the first language to bring non-GC automatic memory management to the mainstream To nitpick, the first language to bring non-GC automatic memory management to the mainstream would be either Forth or C through stack memory. For heaps, we have reference counting, often handled automatically through the stack (e.g., C++ smart pointers). The thing Rust brought to mainstream is not automatic memory management -…

> C through stack memory.

Stack memory is decades older than C.

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#123

Post by Klonoar »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #18

Swift won't be able to compete with rust until it has a great scripting story. Rust is currently the defactor choice if you want to make something with js/python bindings, of id you want to speed up a dynamic bottleneck because it makes it super easy. Swift doesn't even have a good ffi.

Try to make Rust interop with C++, C and Objective-C as easy as Swift does it.

C++ is (IME) an order of magnitude more annoying from Rust than C or Objective-C. I've dealt with interop of the latter two on a number of projects and frankly found them to be fine.

(Though I wouldn't fault anyone for making an argument that Swift is still more ergonomic here)

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#125

Post by bad_user »

noelwelsh wrote: post #13

Hmmm...I disagree with a number of statements in the post but I think the following two hypotheses will make for more interesting discussion than some nitpicks: 1. A large part of why many people love Rust is that it's the first time they've used an ML family language. One of the innovations of Rust was to create a community that felt like home to Unix hackers who weren't programming language nerds. 2. Rust is the fi…

> first language to bring non-GC automatic memory management to the mainstream ... Other languages in this space include Swift

Ugh, “Arc”, aka (automatic) reference counting, is an implementation of GC as well. It may have certain characteristics, like having worse throughput, corner cases, and better predictability/latency characteristics, but it's GC nonetheless. That's not manual memory management. Swift is not a non-GC language.

And that's the big issue that people are missing — Rust tackles some hard problems regarding memory management, and a friendlier alternative exists: garbage collection.

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#126

Post by sorentwo »

swiftcoder wrote: post #22
seanalltogether wrote: post #16

I keep trying to get into rust but I always hit a brick wall when looking at examples and the code looks so complicated. Examples like this straight from the rust website just make my eyes glaze over struct Task { future: Mutex >>, task_sender: SyncSender >, }

I'll grant you that is probably too complicated an example to appear early in the docs, but how often are you actually building multithreaded job dispatch systems from scratch (which appears to be what this example is doing), and how simple would it be in other languages?

Transparently parallel, lightweight tasks are part of the language in Elixir. Fully multithreaded and able to utilize all cores out of the box.

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#127

Post by foldr »

tgv wrote: post #80
noelwelsh wrote: post #13

Hmmm...I disagree with a number of statements in the post but I think the following two hypotheses will make for more interesting discussion than some nitpicks: 1. A large part of why many people love Rust is that it's the first time they've used an ML family language. One of the innovations of Rust was to create a community that felt like home to Unix hackers who weren't programming language nerds. 2. Rust is the fi…

Rust is not really an ML language, is it? &mut is a very noticeable difference. Calling Rust, Scala, Swift and Kotlin ML seems to be taking it too far. Scala and Kotlin even have all the traditional OOP features. You might just as well put C++ in the ML list.

ML has mutable references:

https://saityi.github.io/sml-tour/tour/02-09-mutable-refs.ht...

(OCaml has something similar too.)

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#128

Post by secondcoming »

tialaramex wrote: post #108
agubelu wrote: post #53

> In fact, Swift treats enums as more than just types and lets you put methods directly on it You can do the exact same thing in Rust: impl Coin { fn valueInCents(&self) -> u8 { match self { Self::Penny => 1, Self::Nickel => 5, Self::Dime => 10, Self::Quarter => 25, } } }

Also they probably have their understanding upside down. What's going on here isn't that either Swift or Rust treats the enum types as "more than just types" but that they are indeed first class types, whereas in C and C++ what you get isn't a type at all, it's just a strange way to spell an integer. I don't think Swift has union types, but Rust does and so does C++ and in both languages the unions, just like their m…

C++'s scoped enums are strict types.

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#129

Post by Loic »

noelwelsh wrote: post #13

Hmmm...I disagree with a number of statements in the post but I think the following two hypotheses will make for more interesting discussion than some nitpicks: 1. A large part of why many people love Rust is that it's the first time they've used an ML family language. One of the innovations of Rust was to create a community that felt like home to Unix hackers who weren't programming language nerds. 2. Rust is the fi…

In this context, ML is Meta Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

Re: Swift is a more convenient Rust

#130

Post by lukeh »

afavour wrote: post #111

As someone that’s recently been working on integrating Rust into an iOS Swift app I do agree with a lot of this. I love Rust but the more I’ve used Swift the more I find myself wishing I was just using Swift all the time. That said , the difference between the two has a lot less to do with the language itself than the world surrounding it. You can use Swift cross platform but it’s very obvious that Apple platforms ar…

Well, that article also presents a pure Swift (non-Foundation) solution, WeakRef.
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