Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

Re:Go and Swift take another step up the programming languag... by sanderjd on Thursday December 04, 2014 @04:53PM (#8701911)

I think Swift is a great language, and that creating something new that incorporates some very good ideas into a package that works well with their existing and extensive runtime made a lot of sense, but that tying it to their platform is a damn shame (though not unsurprising).

I don't think the languages you list would have been a great fit, but D would have been a really good and interesting choice. Were it more mature, Rust could have also been a good fit.

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Re:Go and Swift take another step up the programming languag... by bjz_ on Thursday December 04, 2014 @07:16PM (#8702477)

One of the big things for Apple was Objective-C compatibility, which is surprisingly hard to get right. I know because I have been trying to wrap the APIs for Rust. Don't get me wrong: I still would prefer to use Rust on iOS, but Apple has too much invested in their Objective-C APIs to force a subpar experience and migration path onto their developers.

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Re:Go and Swift take another step up the programming languag... by sanderjd on Friday December 05, 2014 @10:36AM (#8705002)

You certainly know more about this than me. Do you think Rust would have been fundamentally more difficult to make compatible with Objective-C than Swift was, assuming Apple had invested the same amount of time and effort? My sense is "no", but I really don't have any clue, and I'm genuinely curious.

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