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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it’s my favorite language.

Now it needs better cross platform support to be more widely accepted.

And a proper IDE and a faster compiler.

Xcode is dreadful with its strange fetish for recompilation even if there were no changes and the compiler is slower with every iteration. The solution put forward for this always seems to be "buy newer hardware".

Absolutely. One of the things I hate most is this thinking "run-time is more important than compile-time".

Well the compiler and the IDE are runtimes too, we developers are users too, we sometimes work on our laptops unplugged and we do want our software to be fast and efficient!

> "run-time is more important than compile-time"

This is a pitfall of Rust as well. I suppose there will always be a tradeoff between stronger static analysis and compilation time, and I'm firmly in the camp that I want my compiler to catch more issues so I don't have unexpected runtime failures, but iteration time matters too, and I'm hopeful improvements can be made in this area.

Sometimes you introduce certain restrictions in the language just for the sake of simplifying the compiler. This is allowed, valid and will be understood by the developers.

For example, for decades most static languages required a symbol to be defined before its first usage. Removing this restiction seemed like a nice little cute convenience but the outcome of it is this horrific slowdown of the build process. Personally I would agree to the restriction if I knew the compiler could be 5x faster which is pretty realistic to achieve, it seems.

Those kinds of restrictions can have their own productivity pitfalls. For instance, it might be the case that requiring declaration prior to usage explicitly will speed up the compiler, but it might also mean that you can't move blocks of code around without paying careful attention to the order of declaration. I think having a permissive compiler, but also being able to profile the compilation process is a reasonable compromise.

Possibly, but there are other kinds of compromises such as allowing arbitrary order only within a class, the C++ way. Or another one: the first (quick) pass treats all function and reference type definitions as forward declarations and skips the details. This way the compiler might be able to do more permissive compilation though not 100% accurate like Swift currently does.

But run-time is more important, isn't that why we compile stuff with optimizations that take ages to process when building products for the end users?

Compilers are hard, compiler bugs can have a devastating effect on one's software, so it's understandable that developers may prefer to take things slow but safe.

I guess ideally this should be a tradeoff in the hands of the developer right? I should be able to produce debug builds quickly so that I can iterate quickly, and if I want a super-optimal release build it's fine if it takes longer.

My half joke is the optimizations slow down compilers. So people then try to make the compilers faster by increasing the levels of optimization. Which means they have to work harder. So they are slower.

In swift things have a module-wide visibility by default, that's why it often rebuilds the entire module after a single change that could implicitly affect other files. The only viable solution at the moment is to break the project into as many small modules as you can.

It's also useful to profile your compile times. Sometimes the compiler is spending most of its time on some small sections of code.

For instance, I was working on a project where the use of one library constituted 80% of our compile time! The library allows you to declare autolayout constraints using operator overloads (i.e. `foo.top == container.top - 20`) and apparently the amount of type inference was just murdering our compile times. Changing libraries took this project from being awful to work on to quite pleasant.

Swift also provides a compiler option specifically for debugging long compilation times: "-Xfrontend -warn-long-function-bodies=100"

Ah, Cartography. Works great in a small project. We ended up moving to standard anchors for almost everything, with some helper methods to handle things like pinning to superviews.

I hear server-side swift is gaining traction

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