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I found this write-up hilarious. I have been toying with the idea of experimenting with Swift under Linux myself for a while now. I guess this puts that idea t
by fefe23 3y ago
I found this write-up hilarious.
I have been toying with the idea of experimenting with Swift under Linux myself for a while now. I guess this puts that idea to rest.
I'm not even talking about the illegal instruction thing or the capricious looking syntax changes. Just the fact that his hello world app caused 350MB of build artifacts in the filesystem, and the five minute build time for the project, are enough to turn me off of Swift.
I come from the good old Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS days. Building even complex applications took mere seconds on an 16 Mhz 80286 with 1 MB (yes, one megabyte) of RAM. I see no excuse for binaries to be big. This is turning me off of Go and Rust, too.
Gotta admire the cojones on those people to call their product "Swift".
I come from a time where the whole application fit into 512 KB RAM. It had to. And it was good that way, because the human brain can't grog that much context at the same time. Nowadays people are pulling in javascript frameworks larger than the whole payroll system of those old days without even a second thought.
- codr7 3y agoThat's most likely 5 min for the initial build of the dependencies though, a one time thing. I find the build times on Linux quite reasonable.
- IshKebab 3y agoDoes that include the Swift compiler or standard library or something? I can't think of a single other language that has a 5 minute compile time for hello world...
- Jtsummers 3y agoIt wasn't a hello world, he said he created a hello world web app. Those are two different scopes.
- taeric 3y agoI'm not sure that really changes the criticism, though? 5 minute builds for a hello world application in most any context sounds scary.
- Jtsummers 3y agoSure, a framework that insists on building BoringSSL (on the first build, but not on incremental builds) has no impact on the long initial compile time.
- emi2k01 3y agoI built BoringSSL WITH optimizations and it took ~1m40s on a Ryzen 5600x. Maybe the OP has a slower CPU but still 5 mins is a lot. Users shouldn't be met with compile times that long on a "Hello, world" program. For comparison, a "Hello, world" server in Rust with Axum and Rustls takes 25s and 16s in release and debug mode respectively.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 3y agoRust binaries can be just as small as C ones: https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-indeed/ https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind... Computers do much more than they could in the 80s.