Comment by vips7L

3 months ago

> It's a cherry picked, out-of-date counter-example. Swift isn't designed for building drivers

Do you have a counter benchmark? The burden is on you here to disprove the data presented. What that benchmark shows is that you spend A TON of time counting references, much more than tracing GC, unless you enter Swifts C++ networking code. I would think games don’t spend most of their time calling into networking code.

> In reality, a lot of Swift apps are delegating to C code. My own app (in development) does a lot of processing, almost none of which happens in Swift, despite the fact I spend the vast majority of my time writing Swift.

So what you’re saying is that any language will be good for gaming since they all can delegate to C?

> Swift an excellent C glue language, which Java isn't. This is why Swift will probably become an excellent game language eventually.

What makes swift better at calling C than Java? AFAIK Java has a perfectly good and brand new foreign function interface.

> This is why Swift will probably become an excellent game language eventually.

I would take this bet that it won’t. Purely on the sheer fact that gaming occurs on Windows and Swift is barely capable there.

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vips7L

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willtemperley  3 months ago

> I would think games don’t spend most of their time calling into networking code.

Exactly. That is why the out-of-date networking example being touted as evidence is irrelevant here.

What it boils down to is that Java and C have fundamentally incompatible memory models. Direct access to C memory is impossible because of the managed heap and GC.

> I would take this bet that it won’t. Purely on the sheer fact that gaming occurs on Windows and Swift is barely capable there.

This is a very odd comment - gaming occurs in a lot of places. Quite a lot happens on mobile these days. Turns out a lot of mobile devices run Swift, on which it appears to be reasonably capable.