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Comment by _mlbt | Hacker News Reader

Swift is a great C++ and Rust alternative that doesn’t get enough attention outside of Apple platforms. It’s a performant, statically typed, compiled language that feels almost like a scripting language to write code in. It’s memory safe, cross platform, has a fantastic standard library, and has excellent concurrency capabilities. Even the non-Xcode tooling is maturing rapidly.

The big weak spot really is lack of community outside of Apple platforms.

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I would love to see a cross-platform desktop UI toolkit for Swift, preferably one that’s reactive and imperative-dominant with declaritivity sprinkled in where it makes sense (all-in declarative design like SwiftUI hits too many language weak points for the time being). Swift is really quite nice to write once you get a feel for it, and as long as one is judicious about advanced feature use, it looks more familiar and less intimidating than Rust does which is great for newcomers.

Swift is coming to Android. That may improve traction. [1]

Having just ported a small library from Rust to Swift, it’s fairly clear that Rust is ridiculously fast but Swift is just so much more readable. Much easier to debug too.

Also - why would Rust only have a max-heap? In the library I ported, the authors had to reverse the algorithmic logic in the entire library for this.

Even though it’s only about half as fast as Rust, Swift performance does start to shine with concurrency.

[1] https://www.swift.org/android-workgroup/

> Also - why would Rust only have a max-heap? In the library I ported, the authors had to reverse the algorithmic logic in the entire library for this.

All you have to do is use a small wrapper type and you get a min heap https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BinaryHeap....

Which shows that Rust devs care very little for ergonomics.

Depending on how you define “ergonomics,” I guess. I think only needing to provide a comparison function is pretty elegant, rather than duplicating the data structure. YMMV.

Swift has IMO surpassed Rust in complexity. Rust changes very little but Swift has gone through multiple major changes and is accumulating cruft.

Swift seems more like an Go or Python alternative

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