"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" by Konrad Malawski (Strange Loop 2023)

I wonder what the author thinks about Swift’s new C++ interop story? Since the Swift compiler includes Clang, and can thus compile both your C++ and Swift into LLVM IR, without the need for an FFI later between the two, couldn’t this be the “Typescript for C++” that the author points out a space for? The Swift folks are very much thinking about Swift as a C++ successor that can be incrementally migrated to so I’m a bit surprised the author didn’t discuss it further — especially given Swift’s spiritual similarities to Rust. There’s a couple great talks on this by folks on the Swift team. John McCall at CppNow [link] Konrad Malawski at StrangeLoop 2023 [this video]

Honestly, Swift seems like such a nice language. Most of the performance and power, great interop, but more directed at application development than Rust (with e.g. refcounting being the default). But as they say, you choose a language for its ecosystem, not for the language itself. It would be great if Swift’s open source ecosystem for stuff other than app development grew. It does indeed seem like Apple is pushing for it with stuff like Swift for embedded. The fairly recent presentation about starting to move FoundationDB to Swift[0] was also very interesting. A follow-up on that at some point would be quite interesting to see too, and would inspire confidence if the process is going well. Arc is also a nice example of a cross-platform app written in Swift, with their fairly recent addition of Windows support. Either way, fingers crossed, and very happy with TFA. PS: does anybody have experience with async/await in Swift? Is it pleasant to use? [0]: [this video]

Yes, Apple themselves, apparently folks wanting Apple to use Rust don't read Apple's documentation or watch talks done by Apple compiler developers. > Swift was designed from the outset to be safer than C-based languages, and eliminates entire classes of unsafe code. -- [link] > Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics. -- [link] "Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases" [link] "So we feel pretty strongly, obviously at Apple our sucessor language is Swift and I am here to talk about features of Swift, both to try to sell you on to it, but also to talk about the things we think are pretty necessary and the ways in which a programming language can support, you know, clear code, safer and more correct code." "Like I said before, Apple has always intended for Swift to be a sucessor language for all of our predecessors, from the top to the bottom of our stack, accessible to novices, powerful enough for experts, it is real a tall order. From [link] to [link] "Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" [this video]