| 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. |
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.