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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

This is really exciting. Every time I see something about Swift my thought process is "that looks like a lovely language but I don't build iOS/macOS apps, oh well". Maybe now I'll give it a real go.

Fun fact: Graydon Hoare, the original inventor of Rust, now works at Apple on Swift.

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That's an outdated but sadly common perception. TensorFlow for example is pushing Swift pretty hard: https://www.tensorflow.org/swift/

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on TensorFlow.

I know it's had some mixed support for other platforms for a while, but it's hard to really invest time and effort into a language before you know it has official support.

didn't all of the original authors of TF4S, including Chris Lattner, leave?

Yes they all did

All of them?? Bad blood

Is tensoflow for swift even still a thing?

Some of the first bits of research using it just started coming out last month

I should really start looking at it again

I don't believe TF4Swift will go anywhere.

Fortran, C++, Python and Julia drive the show and work with full tooling across UNIX flavours, Windows, macOS today.

I'd love to have a modern statically typed language with type inferencing etc. that can be used for scripting, working in a REPL, as well as compiling to native code.

I've never tried Swift, but it seems it could have all the required features. I guess it's just lacking a lot of libraries that work on Linux.

OCaml fits the bill.

Yeah, or Haskell.

But those have been out there in a more or less mature form for decades, with no major uptake in sight. I guess they're just too esoteric for them to reach critical mass. So here I am, stuck with bash/python/C, and dabbling a bit with Rust..

If you would like to work in finance or compiler development, there is enough uptake of ML derived languages.

OCaml definitely has some weirdness that come from its age though (char==byte thing for example.)

Yeah there are some quirks, but that wasn't part of OP's request.

Well, I did specify "modern", which arguably includes sane Unicode handling.

I think a reasonable compromise is to have "char" be a 32 bit type, whereas a "string" would be UTF8.

Not sure if I would call string handling in Swift sane, but to each its own.

(He doesn’t anymore, but he did)

Oh he doesn't? Didn't realize that

Yep! I’m not sure what he’s doing today.

We’ve had several folks go between the two teams, and they’re generally very friendly with each other!

Yes I certainly didn't mean it as a knock on Rust, but as a compliment to Swift

> I’m not sure what he’s doing today.

He seems to be back working on Stellar [1].

[1] https://github.com/stellar/stellar-core/commits?author=grayd...

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