LLVM Founder Chris Lattner Joins SiFive to Lead Platform Engineering

phoronix.com

19 pointsbobajeff3 comments

What's it say about a talented engineer who can't stay put?

Swift languishes without someone to firmly shove it towards crossplatform progress, and the rest of the Apple ecosystem doesn't exactly inspire confidence either. I thought swift was our chance to bring Apple into the new FOSS golden age, as .NET has brought Microsoft.

I think this is a relatively unfounded opinion of Swift. I can see the things you’d pick on to say that it’s languishing, but I think there are many more aspects one can point at times show it coming along very well.

Yes compared to .NET, Swift is far behind, but we have the benefit of having seen 20 years of .NET, and Microsoft have a larger user base, developer base, market for paid software tooling/IDEs, support, developer advocates, and more. I think they’re very different ecosystems and to use .NET as an example of what Swift could have been is to ignore what the Apple developer ecosystem is and is for.

Will this impact Swift for TensorFlow?

https://www.tensorflow.org/swift

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