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by blacktriangle 1777 days ago
I don't think this is fair to Swift. Swift seems to have taken a view that the langauge will force you to be explicit about what you want. For example, the "indirect" keyword. Early Swift did not let you have recursive enums, apparently this can be something of a performance killer I guess was the reasoning. However they are really useful, so Swift added them. However rather than just automatically using an indirect Enum which is easily detectible, Swift forces you to use the "indirect" keyword. Rather than implicitly doing work for you, the Swift compiler stops to ask "are you sure this is what you really want to do? Do you understand the tradeoffs you are making?"

Personally I'm a fan of the Swift approach even if it does balloon the keyword count a bit.

1 comments

I feel it's better to add keywords like that than to over load keywords based on context. See the keyword const in C/C++.

Also better to trust the end used to decide what trade offs they want to make. For instance code that converts a user click to a database query, clean and understandable is more important than performance. If it takes 10ns or 10ms the user ain't going to know the difference.