• asudox@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.

    • mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      “More performant” citation needed. Very well written Rust might be extremely fast, yes, but Rust is also a hard language to get right. Swift is far from a slow language and I would not be surprised if the average rust programmer barely if at all manages to beat out the average swift programmer in terms of speed. As for the amount of programmers interested, hard to tell, but given the sheer amount of Swift devs I’d not be surprised if there were quite a few interested ones and I am unconvinced Rust programmers are statistically more likely to be interested in Browser development.

        • mostlikelyaperson@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Benchmarks mean nothing. These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer. Edit: and as a general note I would also like to point out the relative inconsistency of the results in terms of factor, only further reinforcing my point. I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.

          • Evening Newbs@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Benchmarks mean nothing.

            You’re free to suggest another method of comparing the two languages’ performance. This is the best we’re have, and Rust wins in every single benchmark shown there.

            These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer.

            Citation needed.

            I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.

            I never said it did. I simply pointed out that it’s demonstrably faster than Swift.

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      While Rust would probably have been a good choice for implementing a new browser, I don’t think Swift deserves the criticism it’s getting in this thread:

      • Swift was created by the same person who created Rust, and has many of the same nice traits
      • Swift is a modern language that is easy for plenty of developers to pick up; I’d place it in the same family as Rust and Kotlin
      • Swift grants access to a large pool of native iOS/Mac developers