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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

Nowadays being rewritten into Swift.

"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" by Konrad Malawski (Strange Loop 2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQc9-seU-5k

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That was an experiment the team didn’t end up committing to - it’s been backed out. That said it was a fascinating dive into the flexibility of Swift, and the Konrad’s talk is excellent and worth watching.

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/commit/e52fc3621fd5e41...

Interesting, thanks for sharing, is there a rationale somewhere?

As someone that enjoys using C++ despite all its warts, I can imagine a few reasons, but would nonetheless an interesting read, in case that is public.

I guess that experience might also had an impact on ongoing Swift 6+ features.

The Ladybird project started a similar journey, and indeed they are mainly waiting on Swift 6+ features as documented in their blockers issue: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

I don’t know the specific reasons (and the pull request referenced in the merge commit appears to have been deleted), but my guess is that the extra complexity vs using modern C++ features was not worthwhile to the core FDB team.

Which could be a good reasoning, assuming it is being enforced somehow, in regards to modern best practices, which is usually the main issue.

Indeed - my guess is that there is a policy of "improve things as you touch that area of the codebase" rather than blanket rewriting of working code going on.

It was then backed back in?

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/commit/6cd5ad2ffe1d246...

Huh, apparently so! It doesn't seem like much has happened since - there certainly aren't many pull requests which reference Swift [0] since it was restored.

[0]: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/pulls?q=is%3Apr+swift

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