4 ms·
Supporting both polymorphic and monomorphic compilation helped Swift a lot, but I think the key difference was ultimately just that Apple had a more significant
by sandGorgon 7y ago
Supporting both polymorphic and monomorphic compilation helped Swift a lot, but I think the key difference was ultimately just that Apple had a more significant motivation than Mozilla to pursue dynamic linking and way more resources to throw at this very hard problem.
Interesting stand.
- saagarjha 7y agoAll of macOS's system libraries are dynamically linked, so there's just no way Swift could be used in the OS if it didn't do this right.
- sandGorgon 7y agoThe last part of the line reads (rather politically incorrectly) that Apple has more talent available to solve this problem.
- tinco 7y agoHow would it not?
- saagarjha 7y agoI have no idea of the amount of resources spent, so I'm not sure I can comment on that.
- zozbot234 7y agoOr they were just willing to accept a significant increase in language complexity, to deal with things that Rust just punts on by basically expecting you to stick to #[repr(C)] at your preferred dylib boundary. (Though, potentially, that #[repr(C)] could become e.g. #[repr(SomeArbitraryStableABI)], and there have been proposals to this effect.) And they did this precisely because of that perception that Swift "wouldn't be usable" otherwise.
- littlestymaar 7y agoGiven that the author is a Mozilla employee (working on Rust) and former Apple one (on Swift), I'd be surprised if your interpretation was correct.
- sandGorgon 7y agoI do admit that English is not my first language...but I am struggling to interpret "Apple had way more resources to throw at this very hard problem." any other way.
- rjvs 7y agoCash is a resource.
- littlestymaar 7y agoIt depends what you mean by “talent”, if you use it in the HR way where a “talent” is an employee, then yes talent=resources, but then I don't understand how this is “politically incorrect”. What I understand when you say this: > the line reads (rather politically incorrectly) that Apple has more talent available Is Apple employees are more “talented” than Mozilla's. That's politically incorrect, but I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant here.
- sandGorgon 7y agomaybe they were equal...but Apple had more number of "talent" available. Which then begs the real question - Swift is what Rust would be if Mozilla had more money/resources ?
- bsaul 7y agoOr maybe it's just the hard truth (which wouldn't be surprising considering the valuation of Apple and Mozilla respectively)
- Gankro 7y agoYeah motivation is the bigger factor (why would Mozilla care about the system APIs of an OS, of all things?) but also it doesn't hurt that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world (depending on the day).
- atq2119 7y agoResources != Talent, and the line talked about resources, not talent. It's pretty obvious that Apple can throw more money at the problem than Mozilla can, if they choose to do so. That means they can buy more developers to work the problem, which is bound to be helpful whether those developers are particularly talented or not. There's really nothing politically incorrect about that.
- masklinn 7y agoThey're C libraries, there's very few languages which can't dynamically link to C. The essay is about Swift dynamically linking to Swift directly (not through a C ABI as e.g. C++ or Rust would).
- saagarjha 7y agoThat's why I'm talking about use of Swift itself to implement platform libraries.