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Rust will deal with it by being swifter than Swift. Significantly so: Rust's unique feature is safety without requiring reference counting or GC for all pointe
by comex 11y ago
Rust will deal with it by being swifter than Swift. Significantly so: Rust's unique feature is safety without requiring reference counting or GC for all pointers, which makes it a viable replacement for C and C++ in many situations where other languages would be considered unacceptable, and close enough to viable in others that future versions of Rust have a decent chance of making up the difference. Plenty of applications don't need that, and I look forward to competition between Rust and Swift in those arenas. But the enduring popularity of C++ in the face of the many newer, safer languages out there is testament that Rust's performance advantage is likely to be attractive to a lot of people.
- JeffKilborn 11y ago>Rust will deal with it by being swifter than Swift. By how much? Will extra language codebase justify the speed increase (if any)? Say you're developing some mobile app, why wouldn't you want to use a single unified codebase for front & backends instead of splitting it across Rust and Swift?
- Manishearth 11y agoStraw man. Not all applications are mobile apps on platforms on which Swift is king. On most platforms you can just as easily write it as a single unified Rust codebase. Perhaps even easier.
- steveklabnik 11y agoYou might be interested in http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?test=regexdna http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?... and http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php?test=regexdna http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php...
- JeffKilborn 11y agoHave you seen the new Swift 2.0 benchmarks that they discussed at WWDC 15? It's now getting extremely fast. It won't be long before it surpasses Rust. Anyway, if 5% improvement is all that Rust will have over Swift, it's as dead as Lisp. When Swift is finally open-sourced, there will be a huge exodus from Rust community and move to Swift. This is not survivable. Rust will quickly lose the little momentum that it has right now and it will be game over. Personally I believe that any investment into codebases using Rust is a huge mistake and a waste of money at this point in time.
- steveklabnik 11y agoWell, I certainly wish Swift well, and think they're doing cool stuff.
- sinistersnare 11y agoI personally disagree, there is little chance that Swift will be as fast as Rust and its runtime precludes it from a whole class of use that Rust has. Swift also is annoyingly special-cased, with things like Options being special in the language, and if let only working on options (if i understand correctly). Rust took syntax like if let from swift, and then made it general. Swift also has to deal with Obj-C interop which is not great. I imagine Swift being as popular as Objective-C in terms of non-mobile apps.