Hacker News Reader

Making core package infrastructure 10x slower doesn't seem especially pragmatic.

The author's benchmarks suggest 10× would be a pathological case!

But even so - what price correct & secure software? We all lost a tonne of performance overnight when we applied the first Meltdown and Spectre workarounds. This doesn't seem much different.

We have an alternative that isn't 10x slower, and comes with many other benefits (Rust). The only cost is losing hardware support for some very obsolete and very unpopular platforms. (Nevermind that Fil-C's hardware support is narrower than Rust's.)

Rust doesn't automatically add memory safety to all existing C code, which will need to be maintained for decades, Fil-C nearly does and its still early days.

> We have an alternative that isn't 10x slower, and comes with many other benefits

Anyone involved with development around a fruity company would say Swift ;)

I don't get the impression the Swift team is especially interested in use cases outside of OS X and iOS. (The context here is Debian.)

There seems to be a push to get Swift outside of just Apples platforms, namely Linux and Android support and backend micro service developnent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com