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0 pointsdmurray1y ago0 comments

The alternatives are even less charitable to the Swift creators.

Surely, early in the development someone noticed compile times were very slow for certain simple but realistic examples. (Alternatives: they didn't have users? They didn't provide a way to get their feedback? They didn't measure compile times?)

Then, surely they sat down considered whether they could improve compile times and at what cost, and determined that any improvement would come at the cost of requiring more explicit type annotations. (Alternatives: they couldn't do the analysis the author did? The author is wrong? They found other improvements, but never implemented them?)

Then, surely they made a decision that the philosophy of this project is to prioritize other aspects of the developer experience ahead of compile times, and memorialized that somewhere. (Alternatives: they made the opposite decision, but didn't act on it? They made that decision, but didn't record it and left it to each future developer to infer?)

The only path here that reflects well on the Swift team decision makers is the happy path. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Swift, dude, at least it's an ethos.

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tolmasky1y ago

> Alternatives: they didn't have users?

Correct, it is well known that they kept Swift a bizarre secret internally. It seems no one thought it would be a good idea to consult with the vast swathes of engineers that had been using the language this was intended to replace for the last 30 or so years, nor to consult with the maintainers of the frameworks this language was supposedly going to help write, etc. As you can imagine, this led to many problems beyond just not getting a large enough surface area of compiler performance use cases.

Of course, after it was released, when they seemed very willing to make backward-incompatible changes for 5 years, and in theory they then had plenty of people running into this, they apparently still decided to not prioritize it.

refulgentis1y ago

Quick note, a lot of the broader things you mention are exactly the case, ex. prioritizing backwards compatibility and ABI stability at all costs was a big kerfuffle around Swift 3/4 and publicly documented. ex. limited use initially

Broad note: there's something off with the approach, in general. ex. we're not trying to find the interpretation that's most favorable to them, just a likely one. Ex. It assumes perfect future knowledge to allow objectively correct decisions on sequencing at any point in the project lifecycle. ex. Entirely possible they had automated testing on this but it turns out the #s go deep red anytime anyone adds operator overloading anyway in Apple-bunded frameworks.

Simple note: As a burned out ex-bigco: Someone got wedded to operator overriding and it was an attractive CS problem where "I can fix it...or at least, I can fix it in enough cases" was a silent thought in a lot of ICs heads

That's a guess, but somewhat informed in that this was "fixed"/"addressed" and a recognized issue several years ago, and I watched two big drives at it with two different Apple people taking lead on patching/commenting on it publicly

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