Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Supporting both polymorphic and monomorphic compilation helped Swift a lot, but I think the key difference was ultimately just that Apple had a more significant motivation than Mozilla to pursue dynamic linking and way more resources to throw at this very hard problem.

Interesting stand.

View on HN

All of macOS's system libraries are dynamically linked, so there's just no way Swift could be used in the OS if it didn't do this right.

The last part of the line reads (rather politically incorrectly) that Apple has more talent available to solve this problem.

How would it not?

I have no idea of the amount of resources spent, so I'm not sure I can comment on that.

Or they were just willing to accept a significant increase in language complexity, to deal with things that Rust just punts on by basically expecting you to stick to #[repr(C)] at your preferred dylib boundary. (Though, potentially, that #[repr(C)] could become e.g. #[repr(SomeArbitraryStableABI)], and there have been proposals to this effect.) And they did this precisely because of that perception that Swift "wouldn't be usable" otherwise.

Given that the author is a Mozilla employee (working on Rust) and former Apple one (on Swift), I'd be surprised if your interpretation was correct.

I do admit that English is not my first language...but I am struggling to interpret "Apple had way more resources to throw at this very hard problem." any other way.

Cash is a resource.

It depends what you mean by “talent”, if you use it in the HR way where a “talent” is an employee, then yes talent=resources, but then I don't understand how this is “politically incorrect”.

What I understand when you say this:

> the line reads (rather politically incorrectly) that Apple has more talent available

Is Apple employees are more “talented” than Mozilla's. That's politically incorrect, but I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant here.

maybe they were equal...but Apple had more number of "talent" available.

Which then begs the real question - Swift is what Rust would be if Mozilla had more money/resources ?

Or maybe it's just the hard truth (which wouldn't be surprising considering the valuation of Apple and Mozilla respectively)

Yeah motivation is the bigger factor (why would Mozilla care about the system APIs of an OS, of all things?) but also it doesn't hurt that Apple is one of the richest companies in the world (depending on the day).

Resources != Talent, and the line talked about resources, not talent.

It's pretty obvious that Apple can throw more money at the problem than Mozilla can, if they choose to do so. That means they can buy more developers to work the problem, which is bound to be helpful whether those developers are particularly talented or not.

There's really nothing politically incorrect about that.

They're C libraries, there's very few languages which can't dynamically link to C. The essay is about Swift dynamically linking to Swift directly (not through a C ABI as e.g. C++ or Rust would).

That's why I'm talking about use of Swift itself to implement platform libraries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com