Swift 6 is amazing - I say this as a big Rust person. It seems like Swift is now its own entity outside the Apple bubble and has a few very interesting features:
- An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries
- An upcoming WASM target
- An LSP for VSCode
- Native C++ interop
- Typed "throws"
- Static linking on linux and the linux sdk
- Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation primitives to nix platforms
- Distributed actors for concurrency that run on distant machines
- Data-race free by default
- non-copy RAII generic types
Watch the video on Swift 6: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10136/.
IMO Swift 6 is a better Go and than Go, and a better Rust for app-dev type stuff, which seems to be what people want to use Rust for.
Swift has shipped stuff that Rust has been sitting on its hands over for years:
- Anonymous enums/structs in parameters/match statements
- Named function arguments
- A type of `Send` bound that allows Rcs to be sent between threads (not Arcs)
- Swift preview hotreloading
- autoclones (without GC)
Swift also took a bunch of goodies from Rust *[1]
- No garbage collector
- Traits via "protocol"
- ADT for Option/Result
- macros
- non-copy types enforcing RAII
I really really wish Rust had been keeping up with Swift's ergonomics because it's looking like Swift is going to catch up to Rust's cross-platform story much faster. Swift really could end up as the "do it all" language for frontend/backend/app dev.
[1] By "took" I mean if you like these things in Rust you'll see them in Swift
- An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries
- An upcoming WASM target
- An LSP for VSCode
- Native C++ interop
- Typed "throws"
- Static linking on linux and the linux sdk
- Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation primitives to nix platforms
- Distributed actors for concurrency that run on distant machines
- Data-race free by default
- non-copy RAII generic types
Watch the video on Swift 6: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10136/.
IMO Swift 6 is a better Go and than Go, and a better Rust for app-dev type stuff, which seems to be what people want to use Rust for.
Swift has shipped stuff that Rust has been sitting on its hands over for years:
- Anonymous enums/structs in parameters/match statements
- Named function arguments
- A type of `Send` bound that allows Rcs to be sent between threads (not Arcs)
- Swift preview hotreloading
- autoclones (without GC)
Swift also took a bunch of goodies from Rust *[1]
- No garbage collector
- Traits via "protocol"
- ADT for Option/Result
- macros
- non-copy types enforcing RAII
I really really wish Rust had been keeping up with Swift's ergonomics because it's looking like Swift is going to catch up to Rust's cross-platform story much faster. Swift really could end up as the "do it all" language for frontend/backend/app dev.
[1] By "took" I mean if you like these things in Rust you'll see them in Swift