Chris Lattner on Swift and dynamic dispatch

Re:Chris Lattner on Swift and dynamic dispatch by kibwen on Sunday December 13, 2015 @03:00PM (#10727667)

Apple isn't going to stop supporting C and C++ on their platforms, so it can't "push" Swift at the systems level the same way it can push Swift at the application level on iOS.

I also disagree with your repeated claims that systems languages can only survive when they are pushed by an OS vendor. C and C++ dominate for a host of historical reasons (which I'm sure you're well acquainted with). Meanwhile, Rust, at a low level, is such a transparent skin over C and C++'s low-level semantics that it can almost be considered an alternate syntax for those languages (albeit an alternate syntax with extreme static analyzability).

The takeaway should not be "systems languages only succeed when pushed by an OS vendor", it should be "programming languages tend to succeed when backed by a large corporate vendor and when they are used to write widely-used software that people come to rely on". Swift is guaranteed a bright future by dint of being the application programming language of choice for iOS. Rust's long-term fate likely hinges on Servo, but it's too soon to say whether that's the only large project that has a chance of entrenching Rust (give it six more months at least to see what nascent Rust projects are gathering in the post-1.0 calm).

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Re:Chris Lattner on Swift and dynamic dispatch by pjmlp on Sunday December 13, 2015 @03:31PM (#10727787)

> I also disagree with your repeated claims that systems languages can only survive when they are pushed by an OS vendor.

I was there when Assembly was the only viable choice for targeting home computers, so excuse me if my life experience has made be a bit biased.

So when I see Apple going with Swift, Google and Microsoft pimping up C++ and contributing to the C++ Core Guidelines, I get a deja-vu feeling.

I hope that Rust does get adoption, that killer feature project that blows wind into its sails.

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Re:Chris Lattner on Swift and dynamic dispatch by kibwen on Sunday December 13, 2015 @04:12PM (#10727966)

  > excuse me if my life experience has made be a bit biased.

I appreciate the breadth of your experience, but I think that you're overlooking the context of modern systems languages. :) The systems languages of old were wedded to their intended operating systems (indeed, the motivating product was usually the OS itself, with the language being but a necessary feature (Unix/C is no exception here)). As history ran its course and those OSes fell by the wayside, those languages were naturally marginalized (did there even exist usable Mesa/Modula-2/etc. compilers for Unix?).

Rust is different because it is not beholden to the fate of any single operating system. Not only is it cross-platform by intent, it has hitched its cart to a world-class retargetable backend for the dominant systems languages of today, meaning that platform availability will never be a problem.

There are still plenty of reasons why Rust could fail, of course. But Rust does not require the OS vendors' permission to exist on their platforms (well, except for on non-jailbroken iOS, anyway), and the Rust devs are not especially concerned with those platforms integrating Rust into their kernels (though I'm sure they wouldn't mind).

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