An alternative to regex sounds interesting, too bad their site lacks proper examples and, more importantly, side by side examples of equivalent regex, that’s the best way to sell such an idea.
It’s a wonderful language, it’s general purpose, it’s cross platform, and it’s open source (Apache license). I wish it was a mainstream language outside the of the Apple universe.
What I love the most is it’s so flexible. It’s a full featured OOP language, a full featured Procedural language, a full featured Functional language, a full featured declarative language, and you can relatively easily make it work with anything else you can think of.
It also has the best concurrency system I’ve ever seen - and with high performance computing relying so much on parallel computing these days that’s a must and often what I miss the most in other languages.
A lot of other languages do some things just as well as Swift, but Swift does everything really well.
Completely agree. Unfortunately Apple will need to start treating Swift on non-Apple platforms as a first class citizen for it to achieve any sort of wider popular use.
When Lattner left, it was a signal that they were unlikely to ever move in that direction. Since then, I’d say they’ve moved further away if anything. They certainly made a hell of mess introducing SwiftUI and Combine (though glad to say things have recovered significantly since then).
Rust. I’ve been using it for a while, and I’ve been using more software written in it lately. Stuff you make with it is just better in most ways. In other languages, you have to go above and beyond to make your code fully correct, safe, user friendly, and every trait I value in software. Rust makes those things easy, and so people are more willing to do them, and so things that get made in it are better. Oftentimes it’s just a matter of pulling in a crate and adding a few lines of code.
I’m learning Rust at the moment and I too think I have some reservations with its syntax. Most of these reservations come from my strong preference for functional programming over OOP.
I am unsure if I like method-syntax period, even if it isn’t inherently OO. Chaining just makes me feel uncomfortable in a way piping doesn’t.
Also it seems idiomatic for values of enumerated types to be written Type::Enum, which seems ugly and unnecessary.
Author is removing every part of the initial function, admitting there are reasons those things are there in the first place, only to be left with a slightly more verbose version of an equivalent python implementation. Well then just use python?
Author also doesn’t seem to understand what static polymorphism is/why this specific function is generic. It’s not strictly about “bytes”, it’s about avoiding virtual calls/have nicer API. Author conveniently omits mentioning the clone() calls their version requires from the client call. Or they would make everything automatically cloned, and I already addressed that in the first paragraph I
Finally, standard libraries are notoriously bad examples of “normal” code. They mention it, but still declare that that their example is relevant. If the functions I wrote were compiled and used thousands of times per day I would probably worry more about splitting generic and concrete implementations. I’ll take this over anything in the C++ standard library (which is a much more relevant language to compare rust with than e.g. python)
I think what you’re calling ugly is just static typing. There’s no way to make it look beautiful unless you leave the types away, but then you either end up with some kind of dynamically typed looking language by declaring things twice: once with types and then without.
At first glance, sure it would be easier to read, but if you have to look for the types then things get much harder. Either the types will be in comments, on different lines, or in a different file entirely.
It’s doubtful you’ll find a statically typed language that does a better job. C/C++ look even worse than rust. Go and Zig don’t look good either, IMO.
At first glance, sure it would be easier to read, but if you have to look for the types then things get much harder. Either the types will be in comments, on different lines, or in a different file entirely.
This is pretty much how OCaml works and you can omit the types altogether if you don’t specify an interface file, in most cases. But it’s not hard to deal with in practice since IDEs (and text editor + LSP plugin) can easily show the inferred type on inspection.
Nevertheless, I don’t really find Rust to be ugly either.
Haskell. I think that more people being familliar with Haskell concepts would be good for programing culture and it would increase the odds of me being able to write Haskell professionally, which is something I enjoy a lot when writing hobby code at least. Having more access to tooling and a bigger eco system would be nice as well.
I’m not a 100% sure about my answer though. For one, I might grow to resent Haskell if I had to use it at work, and there’s also a risk that it would be harder to do cool innovative stuff with the language when more big companies depend on it.
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