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Comment by fainpul | Hacker News Reader

I love the clean syntax of Swift, which allows you to omit a lot of syntactic noise. It's so much nicer to write and read than for example Rust with it's ugly wordiness. But the type checker performance really is inacceptable.

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I too appreciate detail-free programs, and I wonder at the value of including all the typedecls and pointer markings, and lifetime markings, and mutability markings interleaved with the logic. Some people I guess believe that the details are "part of the program" and they aid understanding. Do you buy that?

I find that sometimes typedecls aid understanding, but they get in the way if they're the least bit complicated. I'm better off reading the program. I never had problems understanding Lisp programs for some reason.

Maybe you could use a "hide type declarations" view as part of a structurally aware (tree-sitter or LSP-based) code editor?

it seems like the clean syntax makes the type checker's life harder and so performance is unacceptable. would you rather have clean syntax or acceptable compile times?

I want both! I strongly believe the computer should relieve the user of all the obvious, tedious, boring tasks. That includes figuring out types, if they can be figured out by inspecting the code. Obviously this isn't an easy problem to solve efficiently, but I think it's worth optimizing this heavily, instead of just giving up and forcing the developer to write "dumb" annotations.

Edit: I'm no expert in this topic, but Prolog interpreters (compilers?) have some fascinating machinery to solve complex constraints. Maybe a similar approach could help here?

Trait instantiation in most languages is already using a Prolog-like approach.

The IDE experience on Linux doesn't make it any better either.

Oh how I wish I could have a working Swift :(.

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