this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Programming
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Swift has little to no use outside the apple ecosystem, and even if you are currently using Apple, you have to consider your targets as well. Writing in Swift means your code will only be usable by other Apple users, which is canonically a rather small fraction of technology users. Rust on the other hand is multiplatform and super low level, there's very few other languages out there that can match the potential of applications of rust code. Thus you will, in time, be introduced to many other technologies as well, like AI/ML, low level programming, web, integrations between languages, IoT, those are only a few of all the possibilities. On the other hand, even if Swift has a much more mature ecosystem, it's still only good for creating UIs in all things Apple, which is pretty telling; Apple is not willing to put in the time and effort to open it's language to other fields, because it sees no value in them being the ones providing the tooling for other purposes. They pretty much only want people to code web apps for them, and Swift delivers just fine for that. So if your current purpose is making Apple UIs, you could learn Swift, but be warned that either you'll either be doing that your whole life or will eventually be forced to change languages again.
Then again, most languages nowadays aren't that different from each other. I can code in a truckload of languages, not because I actually spent time making something coherent and complete with each one of them, but because I know some underlying concepts that all programming languages follow, like OOP, or functional programming, and whatever those entail. If you learn those you will not be afraid to switch languages on a whim, because you'll know you can get familiar with any of them within a day.
Not to nitpick here, (I agree with pretty much everything you said) but I wouldn't go around calling Rust super low level as it is garbage collected. The borrow checker acts as a abstraction over the actual malloc and free calls that are happening under the hood.
Isn't that basically the same as how C++ RAII works?
Essentially although there are a few key differences:
You raised an issue that the other bulletpoint has the solution for, I really don't see how these are "key differences".
That's what unique_ptr would be for. If you don't want to leak ownership, unique pointer is exactly what you are looking for.
Well yeah, because that's what shared_ptr is for. If you need to borrow references, then it's a shared lifetime. If the code doesn't participate in lifetime, then ofcourse you can pass a reference safely even to whatever a unique_ptr points to.
The last bulletpoint, sure that's a key difference, but it's partially incorrect. I deal with performance (as well as write Rust code professionally), this set of optimizations isn't so impactful in an average large codebase. There's no magical optimization that can be done to improve how fast objects get destroyed, but what you can optimize is aliasing issues, which languages like C++ and C have issues with (which is why vendor specific keywords like
__restrictexists). This can have profound impact in very small segments of your codebase, though the average programmer is rarely ever going to run into that case.