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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Swift has such a long way to go in general ergonomics of its type system, it's so far behind compared to Rust. The fact that the type checker will just churn until it times out and asks the user to refactor so that it can make progress is such a joke to me, I don't understand how they shipped that with a straight face.

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There's nothing wrong with this in principle, every type system must reject some valid programs. There's no such thing as a "100%" type system that will both accept all valid code and reject all non-valid code.

I'm not questioning the principle, I'm critiquing the implementation versus the competition. Swift doesn't do a good job, it throws up its hands too often.

If you solve 80% of the problems by spending 20% of the time, is it worth spending the 80% to solve 20% of the problems? Or even if it is, is it more valuable to ship the 80% complete solution first to get it into the hands of users while you work on the thornier version?

If someone else ships a 100% solution, or a solution that doesn't have the problems your potentially half-baked "80% solution" does, then you might be in trouble.

There's a fine line here: it matters a lot whether we're talking about a "sloppy" 80% solution that later causes problems and is incredibly hard to fix, or if it's a clean minimal subset, which restricts you (by being the minimal thing everyone agrees on) but doesn't have any serious design flaws.

Sure. And I'm not sure the type checker failing on certain corner cases and asking you to alter the code to be friendlier is a huge roadblock if it rarely comes up in practice for the vast majority of developers.

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