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Comment by snovv_crash | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how a rewrite of the core algorithms in modern C++ and a Swift wrapper + UI would have compared. This also would have allowed easy porting of the core to other platforms.

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Very difficult to do that in practice, because there’s currently no way to bridge C++ directly to Swift. You could bridge it via C, but any reasonable implementation would have to severely limit the amount of direct Swift interaction with the core code, or you’d be spending infinite time maintaining the bridge.

Actually C++ could be bridged thru Objective-C++ which at the same time can be bridged to Swift. A little bit manual, but possible

Yes, precisely. I looked into bridging to C++ initially, but it was impractical.

Was it in C++ originally not C? (It seems like a C FFI bridge would have been straightforward from). Or did it already go from C => Objective-C++ a while back?

(I read the article hours ago and didn't notice you'd posted. Btw, I think we would have gotten better conversation if you had said "Hey, this is me! AMA" as a top-level comment)

It has been in continuous development since 1985. Before the port, parts were in C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++, as well as Lex, Yacc, GLSL, and Python. Will do the top-level comment.

There’s partial support which is under active development.

https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/docs/CppInteroperab...

https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-and-c-interoperability-work...

>You could bridge it via C

*Objective-C++

Swift is portable to other platforms. Not the UI but core logic in Swift would have been portable. Swift can be exposed as C APIs.

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