Rust creator Graydon Hoare is now at Apple working on Swift

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-dev/Week-of-Mon-20170123/003899.html

by flount • 9 years ago

211 65 9 years ago

lists.swift.org

Scaevolus• 9 years ago

His fork of the Swift repo dates back to August 29, 2016. Maybe he was hired to replace Chris Lattner?

cowsandmilk• 9 years ago

Lattner was in charge of all dev tools, managing ~200 people. Hoare wasn't hired to take his job.

darksaints2• 9 years ago

It's interesting, and I think it makes sense to me. I started playing with Rust around 0.6 and the focus of the language seemed very different from today. It seemed there was a lot of focus on the more ML-ish aspects of its roots, such as the module system. The language also had a convincing future story for both green threads and garbage collection.

While I wouldn't say that it wasn't a systems language, I would say that it was far more focused on higher level coding than the current rust is. Which is fine IMO...the world can benefit from a new safe low level language far more than it needs a new application-level language. But for someone who really liked the early ideas of rust, swift makes a lot of sense as a substitute.

sfilargi2• 9 years ago

It seemed there was a lot of focus on the more ML-ish aspects of its roots, such as the module system. The language also had a convincing future story for both green threads and garbage collection.

So, OCaml?

darksaints2• 9 years ago

Yes. In fact, the original compiler was written in OCaml. I would say the original intent was to be a lower level OCaml with optional safe control over allocation behavior and safe parallelism.

I think he would probably have preferred OCaml syntax too. Notice some of the idioms, and even the capitalization/underscore norms (UpperCamelCase for types, snake_case for functions) are very similar to OCaml. But C syntax provides a theoretical adoption benefit, so I think he was willing to deal with that.

querulous• 9 years ago

early rust looked a lot like an ocaml/erlang hybrid. green threads and immutability were the entire concurrency story for a long time, in my recollection. it wasn't until later that rust started to look like a safer c++

alrs• 9 years ago

My frustration with Mozilla deprecating everything I need in Firefox has made it impossible for me to trust them as stewards of a language. Hopefully this contributes to a decoupling of Rust from Mozilla.

(EDIT: Am I incorrect that they are deprecating the things I need in Firefox, am I incorrect that I don't trust them, or am I wrong to have hope for a good outcome?)

AsyncAwait3• 9 years ago

Can you share some specifics? What exactly have they deprecated?

neurobashing• 9 years ago

XUL and the entire extensions framework based upon it.

barrkel3• 9 years ago

XUL-based add-ons are being deprecated, and Firefox is adopting the same extension mechanism as Chrome (but with more extension points). That means that add-ons that make more or less drastic changes to the UI will need to be updated, rewritten or abandoned. This is being done before replacements of equivalent capability have been added to the new API. And there doesn't seem to be signs of awareness of the risks of destroying an add-ons platform in the Mozilla team's public representations, or in their reactions to bugs reported by some fairly significant add-on authors considering rewriting to the new API.

steveklabnik3• 9 years ago

Rust is a community project that Mozilla contributes heavily to, rather than the other way around. The sets of people working on those decisions for Firefox and the people guiding Rust's development are disjoint, and all major changes to Rust must go through our consensus-based, community-driven process, so even if Mozilla _were_ to try to declare that Rust should do something against the wishes of the community, they couldn't. It wouldn't work.

(I am a Mozilla employee working on Rust.)

webmaven3• 9 years ago

Is there a page or blog post somewhere that describes Rust's origin story?

binarycrusader• 9 years ago

Graydon stepped down as lead in 2013 from rust, so I don't see how that would have any bearing, and as brson said, Graydon has been on Swift for a while now.

gcp4• 9 years ago

Hoare left Mozilla over 3 years ago.

geofft• 9 years ago

You are incorrect in the assumptions that Mozilla is the steward of Rust (and therefore that you would need to trust them in that role), and that Rust has not already been decoupled from Mozilla.

webmaven3• 9 years ago

You are incorrect that Mozilla is a steward of Rust.

You are incorrect that Rust is coupled to Mozilla.

brson• 9 years ago

Graydon has been on Swift for a while, and there are a few other prominent Rust contributors there as well. I hope they are enjoying themselves and make good things.

kibwen3• 9 years ago

Indeed, Huon Wilson and Alexis Beingessner are both at Apple now, and happily they remain active in the Rust community as well (though under no uncertain circumstances are they allowed to submit code).

I can understand why this is on HN, but as you say this is old news to most of us in Rust. For those not in the know, Graydon left Mozilla for a startup in 2013, and IIRC began at Apple in... 2015?

nnethercote• 9 years ago

under no uncertain circumstances are they allowed to submit code

Really? Why is that?

melling2• 9 years ago

Swift is a nice language. What's really missing is better non-Mac support. Tools, libraries, etc. It'll become a Top 10 language (by popularity) once it becomes a real option for Linux and Windows.

overcast• 9 years ago

Once an official compiler comes to Windows, I'm all on board.

monocularvision• 9 years ago

Better Mac support would be nice too. Using Swift in a larger code base in Xcode often results in long compile times, auto completion and code syntax highlighting failures and other terribleness.

AsyncAwait3• 9 years ago

Agreed!

I think part of the problem is that they rely too much on SourceKit, which is a rather indirect and slow way to provide basic features like syntax highlighting and auto completion. These should be built into Xcode itself. As it is now, SourceKit has to do substantial work in a short amount of time which results in frequent crashes.

The compeller's error messages could use some improvement too, I don't consider 'BAD_EXEC' to be a descriptive error at all.

melling2• 9 years ago

Isn't it a given that it's on the way? You're complaining about known issues.

Apple will obviously improve its Mac tools. What Swift needs is great, and even better, tools for other platforms. Will Apple keep Swift wide open if it Google gives it first class support on Android, for example?

agmcleod• 9 years ago

Mhmm. Really with all those things, i'd give it a serious try for my game development side projects. Currently using html5 for some, libgdx (java) for others.

jayrhynas• 9 years ago

Hopefully the recently announced precompiled bridging headers will help with compile time (for mixed-language products at least):

https://swift.org/blog/bridging-pch/

drivebyops• 9 years ago

What's missing is built in concurrency/parallelism model

It's definitely a better language than C# after that

adamnemecek• 9 years ago

It's the most pragmatic move he could have made if he wants to disseminate Rust's ideas. Having the backing of the largest public company in the world does give you some fire power.

adelarsq• 9 years ago

Bring some Rust goodness to Swift :) Also, really old news on HN

zamalek• 9 years ago

Apparently, static code analysis was part of the Swift goals. Though, the language has evolved too far without it and drastic changes may be needed.

ddito• 9 years ago

They also have Anders Hejlsberg who was the lead architect for C# right? Those are some tough names

Haldir• 9 years ago

Afaik anders ist still at Microsoft doing typescript

behm• 9 years ago

That's like Microsoft was grabbing all the good Borland-Developers for .Net - Does anyone remember that? ;)

Rust creator Graydon Hoare is now at Apple working on Swift

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