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> Swift That's a pretty cool idea. I read something on HN the other day about using swift in the back end, but haven't used it myself. Hopefully Apple gets s

by mises 8y ago

> Swift That's a pretty cool idea. I read something on HN the other day about using swift in the back end, but haven't used it myself. Hopefully Apple gets support for non-ubuntu linuxes as well as windows out the door (especially since they're no longer making their own hardware). I've heard anecdotally that it has very slow compile times, so that might be another issue. > Swift is unique in the server world in that it uses reference counting Out of curiosity, why has no-one done automatic reference counting on the server side before? C++11 has smart pointers, and I believe python does as well (can't speak to this one personally). I also feel like most languages using the llvm backend could achieve performance at least close to c++; wasn't that part of the purpose? It seems like Swift might be especially ripe for this because Apple is the big developer of both LLVM and Swift.

favorited 8y ago
While I'm also bullish WRT Swift-on-the-server, reference counting has absolutely been done in server-side languages before. At least Python and PHP use reference counting, though they both also have runtime cycle breakers. Those examples are both interpreted languages, and they have a higher runtime cost for memory management because they're actively breaking reference cycles, so it's not apples-to-apples, but it's still reference counting.
abalone 8y ago
> Out of curiosity, why has no-one done automatic reference counting on the server side before? My guess is you fall into one of two categories: 1- You don't care a ton about efficiency because you can scale out to infinite servers that are relatively cheap and affordable. So you can run on django or rails or whatever and it's fine at "pre-IPO" scale. 2- You do care, but Java is good enough. So you kind of have to be at Google's scale to care about creating a new server language. In Swift's case, the motivation was super constrained mobile devices, so bringing it to the server side is more of an incremental engineering cost against that massive investment.

by mises 8y ago

favorited 8y ago

While I'm also bullish WRT Swift-on-the-server, reference counting has absolutely been done in server-side languages before. At least Python and PHP use reference counting, though they both also have runtime cycle breakers. Those examples are both interpreted languages, and they have a higher runtime cost for memory management because they're actively breaking reference cycles, so it's not apples-to-apples, but it's still reference counting.

abalone 8y ago

> Out of curiosity, why has no-one done automatic reference counting on the server side before? My guess is you fall into one of two categories: 1- You don't care a ton about efficiency because you can scale out to infinite servers that are relatively cheap and affordable. So you can run on django or rails or whatever and it's fine at "pre-IPO" scale. 2- You do care, but Java is good enough. So you kind of have to be at Google's scale to care about creating a new server language. In Swift's case, the motivation was super constrained mobile devices, so bringing it to the server side is more of an incremental engineering cost against that massive investment.