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.