"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" by Konrad Malawski (Strange Loop 2023)

I wonder what the author thinks about Swift’s new C++ interop story? Since the Swift compiler includes Clang, and can thus compile both your C++ and Swift into LLVM IR, without the need for an FFI later between the two, couldn’t this be the “Typescript for C++” that the author points out a space for? The Swift folks are very much thinking about Swift as a C++ successor that can be incrementally migrated to so I’m a bit surprised the author didn’t discuss it further — especially given Swift’s spiritual similarities to Rust. There’s a couple great talks on this by folks on the Swift team. John McCall at CppNow link Konrad Malawski at StrangeLoop 2023 this video

I'm not a (direct) user of the C++ interop, but everything I've heard about it has been quite positive. A few hopefully relevant resources, first a couple of videos: - "Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases" (John McCall; CppNow 2023) link - "Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" (Konrad Malawski; Strange Loop 2023) this video And then a series of blog posts by Doug Gregor: - "Swift for C++ Practitioners" link And finally: - "Mixing Swift and C++" (Swift.org) link

Honestly, Swift seems like such a nice language. Most of the performance and power, great interop, but more directed at application development than Rust (with e.g. refcounting being the default). But as they say, you choose a language for its ecosystem, not for the language itself. It would be great if Swift’s open source ecosystem for stuff other than app development grew. It does indeed seem like Apple is pushing for it with stuff like Swift for embedded. The fairly recent presentation about starting to move FoundationDB to Swift[0] was also very interesting. A follow-up on that at some point would be quite interesting to see too, and would inspire confidence if the process is going well. Arc is also a nice example of a cross-platform app written in Swift, with their fairly recent addition of Windows support. Either way, fingers crossed, and very happy with TFA. PS: does anybody have experience with async/await in Swift? Is it pleasant to use? [0]: this video