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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Another problem of these languages is that you have to actually learn them, and there's too much to learn. And good luck understanding anything without that encyclopedic knowledge.

To me, it's all just abstractions that get in the way more than they help, tbh.

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> good luck understanding [Swift] without encyclopedic knowledge.

> I prefer C++11

C++ is like the prototypical example for "languages that require encyclopedic knowledge" so this seems like a weird comparison

C++ has most of its complexity in the standard library, and that is easy enough to look up if you don't understand something. It's relatively barebones as far as the syntax goes. Swift, on the other hand, has way too many features a.k.a. syntactic sugar in the language itself.

Uh, no? Just parsing the language is undecidable, there's problems with "vexing parses" and strange overloads, there's like twenty seven ways to initialize things, there's new syntax every release to do something that has already existed in the language…

Exactly. The Most Vexing Parse is so popular it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse

Sorry, but in a previous comment you mentioned that you prefer "dumb programming languages like [...] C++11 without the auto keyword". However "too much to learn" and needing "encyclopedic knowledge" is exactly how most people with different levels of familiarity with the language would describe C++ (with or without auto).

To me it sounds as if your problem is purely lack of familiarity with modern languages, rather than them lacking some specific property that your usual languages have.

I mean you can say that for any language. If someone has to learn C or Java, you still need to learn how those languages work, build domain expertise and so on.

Swift is a very nice general purpose language and I’ve been writing code decades in almost most mainstream languages. I much prefer writing Swift code, in face some of my back end projects have been written in 100% swift, this allowed me to reuse models and APIs with the iOS and MacOS counterparts.

How have you written backend code in Swift, were you able to use it in places you would normally use e.g. C++?

I'm asking because I like Obj-C/Swift, and am wondering if it's possible through some clang/LLVM magic to be able to code Obj-C/Swift in environments that expect C or C++, for example like in Qt. Like, could I have a traditionally C++ app (Qt app) but have most of my code be in another LLVM-compatible language.

There’s a very vibrant backend community for Swift, Vapor is growing and used in production for a lot of companies.

https://vapor.codes

> Like, could I have a traditionally C++ app (Qt app) but have most of my code be in another LLVM-compatible language

It is possible! I mix Swift and Rust in my day job. I use the C ABI to interface between the two. The Swift layer is very thin and pretty much just a bridge between Rust and Cocoa/UIKit/Metal, but there's nothing stopping you from doing the opposite.

If you're going to bridge Swift with Qt, the sanest way is to use Objective-C++ to wrap Qt calls and call it from Swift.

However keep in mind that the Swift experience in other Operating Systems might not be as good as in Macs. That's why I went with Rust for this project. But things might have changed in the meantime!

That sounds really cool.

I did some searching to see people's experiences substituting other languages for C++ through LLVM, and didn't find much other than samples of translated calls.

Given that there would be a big benefit to this (not having to learn a new language, less manual memory management), are there good reasons this isn't way more common?

I thought it was pretty common?

If you use the C ABI you can just link a bunch of object files together.

Rust people are doing it a lot for graphics/game stuff, and there's lots of production MacOS apps mixing ObjC/Swift (because they're transitioning), or consuming C/C++. Of course in this case it's mostly Xcode doing the magic, but behind the scenes it's just calling clang.

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