221–230 of 291 posts
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Lattner is best known for starting the whole LLVM project. Swift is just a small side project in comparison, it just got adopted by Apple for some reason. LLVM is one of the most influential pieces of software of the past decade. Hero worship isn't good but credit where credit is due.
Oh yea LLVM and Clang are incredible pieces of software! He is truly a master.
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ARC is automatic memory management. "The Garbage Collection Handbook", chapter 5 http://gchandbook.org/
Different approaches to memory management differ in extent of how much of programmer's job they automate. Garbage collectors are fully automatic and rarely if ever require to mind anything; automatic RC does almost everything but requires programmer to analyze and annotate some things as 'weak'; manual RC requires a lot more programmer's effort while still technically being "automatic"; and manual memory management m…
There isn't anything like ARC vs GC, that is layman knowledge and just wrong from CS point of view.
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All language communities do that.
I get your point, programming language communities all have a certain level of fan-boyism. However I find Swift's community to be particularly abhorrent. I stopped partcipating when people started to ask if certain codes is "Swifty" and people would judge the merit of something on whether its "Swifty". It also got tiring with how militant they were with other programming languages, especially Java.
https://blog.startifact.com/posts/older/what-is-pythonic.htm...
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It's also the stages of companies. Apple is in very much a "maintain the working business model" phase, especially with the current management. I'm not in a position to say they are wrong for doing so given they've continued to grow and now make as much money as ExxonMobil but with far better profit margins. While Tesla is still on the upward rocket phase while they are still figuring out their product/market. Much m…
Exactly, Apple is to microcomputing what Tesla is to green power and vehicles. We'll see in 10 years after Musk is fired from Tesla by John Sculley.
I know you are being facetious, but similar to Jobs, Musk got ousted as CEO from his first and second companies: Zip2 [1] and PayPal [2].
[1] Vance, Ashley (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, p72.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…
If you want to talk about safety and reliability in automotive, then we talk about Autosar[1]. One of the concepts is to prevent the use of any dynamic behavior, which means you don't need any garbage collection at all. Because garbage collection is not predictable. It can be good and bad, but even a good one is not predictable. Embedded design and development is completely different to classical IT. For IT that soun…
And regarding memory allocation in reliable automotive systems: Yes, the best practice would be not to allocate at all to get to some deterministic behavior. However I've seen lots of projects where "don't allocate" is implemented as "don't allocate with malloc", and you find dozens of custom memory allocators and pools throughout the code. Some of those designs are probably less reliable and safe than using a garbage collected language would be.
What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…
No garbage collection means more fragmentation though which can be an issue at some point perf-wise, there's no free lunch.
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>I don't think Swift stands to gain wide spread traction outside of Apple orientated app development. It already is though, there are several Linux web frameworks etc. It's open source and community run so I'm not sure how they're planning to box out competitors from it.
There are some web frameworks that are indevelopment. That does not mean Swift has gained any traction. Also having toyed around with one, the experience was not great. When writing a server, I would take Go over Swift anyday. It out preforms it, uses less memory, its simpiler, oh and it uses a "tradiontal" GC.
That is very much _not_ the case according to the testing I have done recently.
Swift uses a lot less memory than Go unless the program uses only trivial amounts of memory in the first place. Using interfaces in Go data structures makes the difference even more pronounced.
On top of that, all runtimes that use a tracing GC require tons of spare memory at all times unless programs are very carefully written to avoid memory allocation.
That said, Swift has a few very weak spots when it comes to memory. Most notably the String type, which is terrible on all counts, but that is a whole different story.
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Sure Lattner and Musk are interesting people, but I find the level of hero worship in the tech industry to be sickening. Having used compilers for a few new languages (Rust, Go, Dart, Kotlin, Swift). Swift is the only one I've had any issues with as well as Swift seems to be the only language to have adopted the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. I dunno, I just don't see the argument.
Lattner is best known for starting the whole LLVM project. Swift is just a small side project in comparison, it just got adopted by Apple for some reason. LLVM is one of the most influential pieces of software of the past decade. Hero worship isn't good but credit where credit is due.