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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Counterpoint, I believe the Swift syntax strikes a much better balance than Rust in terms of ergonomics and argument labels are awesome for designing fluent APIs. There are things that Rust does better, aside from having a bigger ecosystem, namely the whole borrowing/ownership system, though they’re catching up (noncopyable types and references are coming soon).

    The concerns about ARC are generally a bit overstated, ARC only comes into play with classes, which modern Swift greatly deemphasizes in favor of structs, enums and protocols. Sure, sometimes you need them, especially when interoperating with Objective-C, but Rust has its escape hatches for reference counting too (Rc/RefCell, Arc/Mutex), those are just (intentionally) a bit more verbose.

    In short, Swift encourages a very similar, value-oriented programming style as Rust with a modern type system (generics, associated types etc.), while offering lots of nice syntactic sugar (property wrappers, result builders etc.)




  • Projects for Apple platforms usually also use .h, where it could mean anything from C/C++ to Objective-C/C++.

    In practice, Clang handles mixed C/C++/Obj-C codebases pretty well and determining the language for a header never really felt like an issue since the API would usually already imply it (declaring a C++ class and/or Obj-C class would require the corresponding language to consume it).

    If a C++ header is intended to be consumed from C, adding the usual #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" {... should alleviate the name mangling issues.