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I think after about Swift 4.0, if you're writing a native application in [systems language] and you're using Arc/Rc/shared_ptr all over the place you need to se

I think after about Swift 4.0, if you're writing a native application in [systems language] and you're using Arc/Rc/shared_ptr all over the place you need to seriously take a step back and ask yourself why you're not using Swift. If Swift had structural references (for all intents and purposes in Swift, all structs are value types and all classes are automatically reference counted pointers) and move semantics Swift would absolutely kill it. It's an exciting time to be a PL nerd.

kibwen 11y ago
I'm a Rust fan, but I'll still be excited if Swift manages to add some sort of borrow checker to the language in a future revision (C++, D, and Nim have all also at least alluded towards such a direction, but only C++ has made any progress so far). From what I've seen though, I'm still not sure that Chris Lattner has given serious thought to such an addition. I'm waiting for a concrete proposal before getting my hopes up, because Rust had to make put significant effort into tailoring the base language to borrow checking and implementing such an analysis after the fact runs the risk of serious divergence (or worse, breakage) in the ecosystem. (There's also the fact that, as of the hypothetical Swift 4k, none of the library ecosystem will be leveraging the borrow checker and so Rust will still have a substantial head start for people who want thoroughly static ownership.) Other than that I'm a bit dismayed that Swift just punts concurrency to GCD, given how many other new languages make concurrency such a major focus (especially Rust).