Supposedly faster in Swift 6 but I don't have any big swift projects to throw at it. It uses LLVM so it's not going to be as fast as Go's.

In Swift 6 they:

- Improved parallelism via compilation pipelining (ie top-level object files are referencing not-yet-compiled symbols but can still proceed while those compile in the background)

- Parallelized and pipelined debug symbol generation (lazy debug symbols)

Assuming my experience with Swift 5 is still accurate, compilation speed is at least an order of magnitude slower than Go.

It’s a much more powerful language. In my opinion slower compilation is worth it for all of its great features. (Does Go even have parametric enums?). But its definitely a trade off.

That’s the one big loss from moving off Objective-C. Because the language was so stupidly simple to parse and didn’t have a lot of “we’ll figure that out for you from what you wrote” it could be compiled incredibly quick on today’s machines.

I know they’re working on improving it. I’m glad they are. But that speed is something I definitely miss.

Ocaml makes me wonder if we really do need the trade off. It’s a fairly advanced language, and compiles super fast. I wonder why it’s such an outlier among advanced languages?

Why, would you care if it's a full second or even 5 seconds?

Go hyped their compilation speed a lot in its early years, but unless it's C++ templates level slugginess it's not like it's that big of deal.

Compiling fast has ripple effects throughout your workflow. Having your iteration time go from 1s to 5s is a massive difference: it can mean you break out of the flow state when you restart your server to test your code.

As someone dealing with Swift everyday (and, before that, faster langs like Elixir and Typescript), I can only agree. Sometimes my incremental builds take 20-30 seconds and it feels like a huge toll. Waiting on the CI (which is a weak machine) is up to 25 minutes until the test suite has passed - a large chunk of that being compilation time. Releases take 5-10 minutes.

I really like Swift, but I’d highly appreciate faster compilation times.

Swift compilation is slower than C++.

C++ with heavy template use or C++ as glorified C-with-classes?

C++ with heavy template use.

Once you use a language where compile times are essentially invisible, it’s hard to go back.