News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Introducing Swift. Parent comment

Re:Introducing Swift by BrandonM on Monday June 02, 2014 @08:26PM (#7837428)
You seem to desire both stability and a faster 1.0 release. The realistic choices are:

    1. Release fast and iterate
    2. Release fast and be stuck with mistakes
    3. Release slow
Option #1 breaks stability, so that's out.

Swift appears to be taking option #2 (Apple doesn't commonly break APIs, do they?), but we can't even really be sure because it hasn't been developed in the open the way that Rust has. It's possible that it's been in development as long as Rust, and we simply haven't heard about it yet. Either way, option #2 is a perfectly reasonable one to go with; it has served Java quite well (for a loose definition of fast), though it has required some creative approaches to language improvements.

Rust is taking option #3. C has been around for over 40 years now. If Rust hopes to supplant it, it seems reasonable to take a few extra months (or even an extra year) to put out a solid version 1 that won't hamstring the language or force a breaking change down the line.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Introducing Swift by kainosnoema on Monday June 02, 2014 @10:11PM (#7837771)
Apple just announced in the Platform State of the Union that they won't guarantee source compatibility until Swift is released along with iOS 8 (changes to the language will require source conversions), so I believe they're taking a route closer to option #1.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Introducing Swift by taharvey on Wednesday June 04, 2014 @09:44PM (#7849708)
No I'd say Apples approach was: methodically develop until very polished first, then announce after. You just didn't get to see the 0.1, 0.2, 0.3... versions.

This is actually nice, because knowing about languages years before they are production ready probably just slows developer adoption because nobody is quite sure when they should trust there development process to a new language.

[ Parent | on HN ]