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There is a lot of great tech behind Swift and LLVM. I really enjoyed learning a bit (no pun intended) of Rust a few years ago, but it didn't stick for what I ne
by mark_l_watson 6y ago
There is a lot of great tech behind Swift and LLVM. I really enjoyed learning a bit (no pun intended) of Rust a few years ago, but it didn't stick for what I need. I really like Swift, but I have only done one SwiftUI app, all the Swift stuff I do is on the command line with swift build/test/run with a light weight editor. Apple's pre-trained deep learning models are very useful, and an edit/build/run iteration is just a second or two.
I wish Rust had been around 30 years ago when I loved doing low level programming. Between my C++ books and gigs, C++ was good financially but Rust is just better (apologies to people who love C++).
- onei 6y agoWhile many of the ideas in Rust are not particularly radical in terms of compiler research, I think part of its success is because it had the past 30 years of lessons. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Maybe in another 30 years we'll see a new language that learns from Rust's inevitable mistakes.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> I wish Rust had been around 30 years ago when I loved doing low level programming. I think Rust’s killer feature is lifetime analysis by the compiler. In 1991, you had 33 MHz 80486 with around 4 MB of RAM. I don’t think the average developer had the computing power to do Rust’s lifetime in any reasonable amount of time.
- pjmlp 6y agoIndeed, but they could have used a Pascal dialect, Basic compiler dialect, or Modula-2 to save many of the security headaches of C.
- fluffything 6y agoLifetime analysis doesn’t even show up in Rust compiler profiles. It takes 0 seconds. Rust lifetime analysis is a function-local pass. It never needs to access any state outside the function. It can be done on all functions in parallel, etc. You could do Rust alias analysis with 33 MHZ.