> Zig is much more suitable, because it actually addresses the readability aspect

How? It doesn't look very different from Rust. In terms of readability Swift does stand out among LLVM frontends, don't know if it is or can be used for systems programming though.

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Someone 2 days ago | parent [-]

Apple claims Swift can be used for systems programming, and is (partly) eating its own dogfood by using it in FoundationDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444876) and by providing examples of embedded projects (https://www.swift.org/get-started/embedded/)

I think they are right in that claim, but in making it so, at least some of the code loses some of the readability of Swift. For truly low-level code, you’ll want to give up on classes, may not want to have copy-on-write collections, and may need to add quite a few some annotations.

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galangalalgol 2 days ago | parent [-]

Swift is very slow relative to rust or c though. You can also cause seg faults in swift with a few lines. I Don't find any of these languages particularly difficult to read, so I'm not sure why this is listed as a discriminator between them.

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saagarjha 2 days ago | parent [-]

But those segfaults will either be memory memory safe or your lines will contain “unsafe” or “unchecked” somewhere.

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galangalalgol a day ago | parent [-]

You can make a fully safe segfault the same way you can in go. Swapping a base reference between two child types. The data pointer and vft pointer aren't updated atomically, so a thread safety issue becomes a memory safety one.

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saagarjha 16 hours ago | parent [-]

This is no longer allowed with strict concurrency

	▲	galangalalgol 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When did that happen? Or is it something I have to turn on? I had Claude write a swift version of the go version a few months ago and it segfaulted. Edit: Ah, the global variable I used had a warning that it isn't concurrency safe I didn't notice. So you can compile it, but if you treat warnings as errors you'd be fine.