Comment by isodev

10 hours ago

I’m surprised Apple is still not dogfooding their allegedly safe language Swift. Or was the whole exercise of Swift 6 mostly marketing

3 comments

isodev

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pjmlp  9 hours ago

They certainly are, one of the reasons behind Embedded Swift is to replace iBoot firmware currently written in a C dialect similar in ideas to Fil-C, with something better.

However it is no different from the Linux kernel, just because Rust is now allowed, the world hasn't been rewriten, and no sane person is going to do a Claude rewrite of the kernel.

vsgherzi  9 hours ago

Swift is definitely being used at apple. Most recently added as a CSS parser in safari and running embedded in some of the secure enclave parts. I know there was talk from as far back as strangeloop to get it in the kernel but I'm not sure how far that has gone. That being said they've been huge proponents of fbounds check in clang which can achieve a small portion (but important!) of what memory safe languages can do. I'd also like to see more swift or alternative adoptions I think they have potential and more competition in the safe language space is always welcome.