Performance These Days →
Great post by Brent Simmons on where programming-language performance still matters, and where it doesn’t.
I don’t know much Swift yet. But I’ve felt since its introduction that while it seems like a good language overall, it feels more like a language designed by C++ enthusiasts to replace C++, rather than being particularly optimized for 99% of what it’ll really be used for: making high-level mobile and PC apps.
Objective-C wasn’t much better for this, but I think we could’ve done better than Swift if the most important goal in Swift was maximizing real-world developer productivity when writing modern Mac and iOS apps. Swift does a little of that, but gives up a lot to also serve lower-level, more clever, language-geekier goals.
The idea of one language to serve all roles, high-level to low-level, is an interesting thought challenge, but I don’t think it could exist.