Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by finalfantasia 405 days ago
“Swift has turned into a gigantic, super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff…”

— Chris Lattner, 2024

https://blog.jacobstechtavern.com/p/apple-is-killing-swift

3 comments

As he mentioned in a forum post some years ago, Chris wanted the language to be more modular, but Apple's drive for adding features to it sets very different priorities.

To be fair, every new language version usually includes things that eliminate those special cases making writing the code more straightforward. Like the described support of functions in key paths, or the ability to set default global actor isolation.

I wonder why the author left Go out of his list of examples of language stewardship.
how can the next great language avoid the trap of syntax bloat while providing the same extraordinary functionality
By not providing them. Say "sorry, here is an ugly workaround, generate this xy code."