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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Having the ability to overload functions or constructors without a million Stuff::with_x variants is something I consider more ergonomic and not unsafe. I know the Rust community prefers explicitness in many places, but explicitness and safety are somewhat orthogonal in language design. I consider e.g. Swift to be a safe and ergonomic/sugared language, that borrows, no pun intended, a lot of ideas from Rust


  • As long as you limit yourself to a subset of modern C++, it’s actually a decent language. Less guardrails than Rust, but more syntactic sugar (think overloading, default parameters, implicit this, implicit reference-taking, implicit conversions). You could argue those are anti-features, but even as someone who really likes Rust, I gotta admit C++ is occasionally more ergonomic.



  • Seriously. There are a lot of parallels between GPUs (or NPUs for ML inference) and quantum processors in terms of being architected towards a more specialized form of computation and I could totally see QPUs being a thing in the future, probably mostly for number cruncing (see Grover/Shor’s algorithms). Though if Grover search suddenly becomes the way of quickly searching for files or something, who knows, maybe this might be more useful for general computing than we think.

    In the 80s no one thought computers would be something normal people would use at home, they were seen as a tool for mathematicians and nerds. Now look at the world today. Who knows what the future will hold.











  • Counterpoint, I believe the Swift syntax strikes a much better balance than Rust in terms of ergonomics and argument labels are awesome for designing fluent APIs. There are things that Rust does better, aside from having a bigger ecosystem, namely the whole borrowing/ownership system, though they’re catching up (noncopyable types and references are coming soon).

    The concerns about ARC are generally a bit overstated, ARC only comes into play with classes, which modern Swift greatly deemphasizes in favor of structs, enums and protocols. Sure, sometimes you need them, especially when interoperating with Objective-C, but Rust has its escape hatches for reference counting too (Rc/RefCell, Arc/Mutex), those are just (intentionally) a bit more verbose.

    In short, Swift encourages a very similar, value-oriented programming style as Rust with a modern type system (generics, associated types etc.), while offering lots of nice syntactic sugar (property wrappers, result builders etc.)