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A comment on Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compiler Research [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by boterock on Sunday December 18, 2016 @09:02AM (#13205830)
The c style for loops were also dropped. now you do `for idx in 0...5` or you can also do `for idx in 0..<5` I think this makes clearer if you want to include or exclude the last index in the loop.

I think that this kind of break is not that bad, swift is a young language, and there are some things that only after so much testing you realize it could be better.

Swift is 2.5y old, it has just one year being open source, so I don't think these breaking changes as a big deal. It is not in a situation like Python 3. Even the compiler helps you fix it and XCode is very helpful when translating Swift 2 to Swift 3, so it is not that bad.

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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by mike_hearn on Sunday December 18, 2016 @09:22AM (#13205871)
Swift development started in 2010, so it's about 6.5 years old at this point.
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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by hyperpape on Sunday December 18, 2016 @01:00PM (#13206769)
Which is still younger than Rust or Go, it's probably the youngest widely used language.
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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by kibwen on Sunday December 18, 2016 @02:32PM (#13207157)
Rust didn't start real development until 2010, it was mostly notes and incomplete PoCs before then (which I'm sure Lattner was doing for Swift before 2010, and Pike for Go as well).
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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by hyperpape on Sunday December 18, 2016 @04:46PM (#13207847)
As I understand it, July 2010 was literally the first commit for Swift in any form (https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/04/apples-new-programming-lan...), as a personal project for Chris Lattner. I think the complete history is on Github now.

Of course, age only tells you so much about the amount of work put into the project, and Rust in particular took a huge amount of conceptual work to get its current model of ownership.

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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by danappelxx on Sunday December 18, 2016 @01:45PM (#13206975)
Source?
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Re:Swift: Challenges and Opportunity for Language and Compil... by mike_hearn on Sunday December 18, 2016 @02:00PM (#13207034)
Wikipedia.
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