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Comment by hn-acct | Hacker News Reader

Do people actually believe that there are too many keywords? I’ve never met a dev irl that says this but I see it regurgitated on every post about Swift. Most of the new keywords are for library writers and not iOS devs.

Preventing deadlock wasn’t a goal of concurrency. Like all options - there are trade offs. You can still used gcd.

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> Do people actually believe that there are too many keywords?

Yes they do. Just imagine seeing the following in a single file/function: Sendable, @unchecked Sendable, @Sendable, sending, and nonsending, @conccurent, async, @escaping, weak, Task, MainActor.

For comparison, Rust has 59 keywords in total. Swift has 203 (?!), Elixir has 15, Go has 25, Python has 38.

> You can still used gcd.

Not if you want to use anything of concurrency, because they're not made to work together.

Most of your listed examples aren’t keywords though. They’re built in types or macro decorators.

Task and MainActor are types.

So?

If you’re including types, you’d hit the many hundreds if not thousands in most languages.

It dilutes any point you were trying to make if you don’t actually delineate between what’s a keyword and a type.

So... they aren't keywords.

Swift does indeed have a lot of keywords [1], but neither Task or MainActor are among them.

[1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-syntax/blob/main/CodeGene...

I never said they’re keywords. Y’all way too focused on defending Apple at all cost.

Replying to someone talking about keywords with a list of something that's not keywords, then retreating to "you are an Apple bootlicker" when someone points that out, is not a good look.

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