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by klodolph 1254 days ago
Somebody rewrote an app in Swift -> the app is slower.

Somebody rewrote a library in Swift -> the library is faster.

There's a lot to talk about and unpack here. My experience is that people develop a different mindset when they do library development, because any code that they write will be code that they're forced to support for decades to come. You put bad code in an app and you can simply rip it out with the next revision, no questions asked. So you are much more likely to end up with questionable code in an app than in a library.

I'm also old enough to remember not only the same complaints when people were rewriting apps into Objective C (lots of early Mac OS X apps were Carbon, including Finder), but when the same complaints were made about rewrites from assembler into C. Every decade your computer has a hundred times more computing power and your code takes 10x as much footprint, so you come out ahead, on average. It's just that any given year you might come out behind.