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Comment by jaegerpicker | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little torn by this, I love Rust and think it has the potential to be a great language. So in that regard this is really cool and neat. On the other hand I also really like swift and I have a hard time understand what benefit Rust would give over swift since Apple had put a large amount of work into the overall safety of swift interop with Obj-C, though it's far from perfect.

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> I have a hard time understand what benefit Rust would give over swift

Rust is a drastically better-designed language, with substantially improved safety mechanisms, more advanced memory management (via lifetimes), generally better performance, and more powerful (generic) ADTs, to name a few things. That said, I'm not convinced it's better for the UI-centric development that Swift is targeting.

While I agree with you, to be fair to Swift it has other goals, and one primary one is to seamlessly work with existing objc, which it's excelled at.

> to be fair to Swift it has other goals

Exactly. If those are goals you share use Swift. If not, it may not be a good match.

So the question is valid: what benefit does one get using Rush over Swift on developing for Mac? Rust may be a better language overall, while still be an inferior choice in this context of Mac OS X Native app development.

I listed some of the benefits earlier in the thread. What I obviously can't do is prove it's better for native app development, because that depends on the developer.

Swift is a great language. I think the benfit comes in when you want to share the logic with another application, personally. I'd make the Apple version Swift + Rust.

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