Comment by Decabytes
2 years ago
I totally get using Swift in this context considering their heavy emphasis on C++. From my personal experience, Swift still feels like the early days of Open source .NET/Mono. You will definitely experience the growing pains of being an early adopter of the language. The fact that JetBrains killed AppCode in Dec of 2022 7 years after Swift went Open Source is telling to me that getting the traction outside of the Apple ecosystem is not there. The vast majority of the people I see developing open source Swift apps still use Xcode and a Mac. For example Miguel De Icaza is a huge proponent of open source Swift, and is doing a lot of cool things with Swift Godot. But he develops on a Mac just like everyone else. The experience with VScode is just okay.
I think that the cross platform story both in terms of developer libraries, experience, and tooling is still much better on .NET, and provides a happy middle ground between something like Swift and Java. With that beings said I hate the options for Mobile/GUI with .NET (MAUI, or AvaloniaUI), and would recommend Java/Kotlin if you want to do that. I want to give a special shout out to F# as I feel like it is the most sensible functional programming language I've ever used, and is a lot less verbose then C#. The only knock against it I have is that it's a smaller community than C# and most of the libraries you use will be written in C# so you need to know a little C# as well to be effective
C# has a uphill battle against those that don't believe in systems programming languages with GC, despite several graphical workstations have been done in the past in such languages.
Unfortunately freebie UNIX, and security was yet decades away to be relevant to governmental regulators, thus they never managed to gain enough mindshare to keep going.
Additionally even with all the .NET team efforts, the technology remains mostly relevant to Microsoft shops.
I seldom see RFPs from UNIX first culture companies, that quote .NET as possible delivery technology.
GC still has the downside of higher memory overhead. While I’m not particularly a fan of Swift, this is a relevant argument for a general-purpose browser implementation.
Reference counting is also a GC algorithm, even though people pretend otherwise, as they seldom learn from CS literature.
Plus all systems languages with GC, including C#, can do C and C++ style memory management.
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The degree to which GC issues in the context of deterministic memory management apply to C# is incomparably lower to pretty much every other language that offers GC (especially JVM family) or a similar automatic memory management capability (except Swift or D).
However, D's GC is very rudimentary, and Swift pays very hefty performance price imposed by ARC for lower memory footprint and somewhat more predictable memory behavior.
In the context of writing something like a browser engine, both Swift and C# offer strong if different capabilities to control or avoid allocations, with Swift introducing Rust-like lifetime annotations for affine-like memory management, while C# relying on improving escape analysis in compiler and much better integration of plain structs and byreflike structs (they can hold GC-aware pointers called byrefs (`ref` keyword) to arbitrary memory) with generics for zero-cost abstractions.
Note that today, if I ever dared to even think about writing a browser engine, then the choice would have been Rust. But if not Rust, then C# would have been the next on the list. Some may suggest Zig but I have only brief knowledge of it so cannot comment further.
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Luckily, for the project of this type, you can use SkiaSharp (which is awesome) or simply implement a rendering back-end that targets OpenGL/Vulkan/DX/Metal. There are rich binding libraries with low/zero overhead to do so like TerraFX or Silk.NET or you can just do it directly.
For example, Avalonia implemented Vulkan back-end some time ago, no C or C++ required: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/pull/12737
Even then, you are absolutely not married to any of these GUI frameworks, but if are targeting desktop, then Avalonia offers great user experience.