Re:Apple is looking for engineers to convert its code from C...
by msla on Saturday March 21, 2020 @09:01AM
(#22646208)
> If you aim for performance, "pretty good" doesn't cut it.
"Performance" isn't an absolute, and, going by the fact C++ is apparently acceptable in some "performance" codebases, there's more to it than directly controlling every single RAM allocation and making every single use of memory take maximal advantage of cache. You can't even get that in C without deep knowledge of internal compiler details.
Rust gives no finer control than C does, overall, but it installs some guard rails to make the language less accidentally unsafe. That's proof that "performance" isn't the primary goal with this codebase; if it were, it would be re-written in assembly, and the guard rails be damned.
So Swift isn't immediately out, unless profiling deems it so.
"Performance" isn't an absolute, and, going by the fact C++ is apparently acceptable in some "performance" codebases, there's more to it than directly controlling every single RAM allocation and making every single use of memory take maximal advantage of cache. You can't even get that in C without deep knowledge of internal compiler details.
Rust gives no finer control than C does, overall, but it installs some guard rails to make the language less accidentally unsafe. That's proof that "performance" isn't the primary goal with this codebase; if it were, it would be re-written in assembly, and the guard rails be damned.
So Swift isn't immediately out, unless profiling deems it so.