Comment by SatvikBeri
1 day ago
Eh, he's given an interview where he talks about the Swift decision. He and several maintainers tried building some features in Swift, Rust, and C++, spending about two weeks on each one IIRC. And all the maintainers liked the experience of Swift better. That might have ended up wrong, but it's a pretty reasonable way to make a decision.
Yeah, main issue with Swift is that the c++ interop (which was absolutely bleeding-edge) still isn't to the point of being able to pull in parts of the Ladybird codebase.
If I recall correctly, part of this was around classes they had that replaced parts of the STL, whereas the Swift C++ interop makes assumptions about things with certain standard names.
Two weeks with Rust and you're still fighting with the compiler. I think the LLM pulled a lot of weight selling the language, it can help smooth over the tricky bits.
idk man it's rare to fight the compiler once you've used Rust for long enough unless you're doing something that's the slightest bit complex with async.
You get to good at schmoozing the compiler you start to create actual logical bugs faster.
That's why I said "two weeks."
That goes for almost every language. I recall my first couple of weeks with various compiled language and they all had their 'wtf?' moments when a tiny mistake in the input generated reams of output. But once you get past that point you simply don't make those mistakes anymore. Try missing a '.' in a COBOL program and see what happens. Make sure there is enough paper in the box under LPT1...