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by roop 4046 days ago

    > ... we learn that debug builds are often 100 times slower
    > than optimized builds (which themselves don't really
    > rival C).

    > Sorry, that's not the sign of a language that's 
    > "designed to be fast".
Doesn't this just mean the the language was "designed to be fast", but to be fast only in release mode, and not in debug mode as well?
1 comments

To have fast compiles be within x2 (or thereabouts) of optimized build is very important for plain productivity reasons. Therefore it's a very valid concern.
For the kind of applications that Swift is intended for now (i.e. iOS / Mac apps), debug-mode runtime doesn't affect productivity very much as long as runtimes are fast enough to respond to UI events. It might affect automated testing times, but not productivity directly.

So, for that particular use-case, debug-mode being within 2x of release-mode build is not a valid concern.

What would affect productivity for this kind of use-case is build times. (Swift isn't great here either.)