rand VS swift

Making compatibility promises for distributions means they cannot take advantage of potential advancements in the field.

Defining an error type that is meaningful, portable, and compatible with no-std isn't straightforward. If the std lib's getrandom requires std, then just like that, rand and many other crates won't use it anyway. Using io::Result seems to me to face this challenge.

Some wasm targets can’t generate random numbers at all but in the case of the book because you are using wasm in a browser you can use JS to generate random numbers. I believe there’s a way to get the rand crate to use JS as the backend for generating rand but its a bit more convoluted than the easy one-liner that the book suggests.

rand

This uses rand and xcomplex to handle the mathematics, png to write image files, and dialoguer and indicatif for some pretty prompts and progress bars.

You can often achieve this without any unsafe by putting an assert!() on the length before the hot loop. For example, I got rid of some unsafe in rand that way.

This is a widely used method to map random integers to floating point numbers, but it has the disadvantage of wasting 1 bit of float mantissa precision.

On modern CPUs, its computational advantage over full-precision mapping methods, such as multiplication by a float, is not always clear [1].

[1] https://github.com/rust-random/rand/issues/416

In fact, there are a lot of crates in Rust where in other programming languages, it would be included in the standard library. Examples are regex, random number generators, additional iterator methods, macros for other collections, num traits, loggers, HTTP libraries, error handling, async runtimes, serialization and deserialization, date and time, and many more.

Because of C/C++ interop, and integration with CMake, you can just add Swift to a Zephyr project and it pretty much Just Works. [The docs](https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/EmbeddedSwift/...) should mostly apply to the Zephyr SDK as well.

Fortunately, the Observation framework is part of the Swift 5.9 standard library. We can learn more information by examining its source code.

They do! See https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/LibraryEvoluti...

You can also see an example of what a different high level language integration with Swift ABI looks like here: https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/main/proposed/swift-i...

So is differentiable Swift a package for Swift or is it part of the Swift standard library? The video says go to swift.org but I can't find any info about differentiable Swift on that site.

Swift's Differentiable Programming Manifesto. Swift has a powerful differentiable programming component, integrated with the compiler.

You can do the same thing the other way around - https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Android.md.

Codable (along with other derived conformances like Equatable, Hashable, and RawRepresentable) is indeed built in to the compiler[0], but unlike Serde, it operates during type-checking on a fully-constructed AST (with access to type information), manipulating the AST to insert code. Because it operates at a later stage of compilation and at a much higher level (with access to type information), the work necessary is significantly less.

With ongoing work for Swift macros, it may eventually be possible to rip this code out of the compiler and rewrite it as a macro, though it would need to be a semantic macro[1] rather a syntactic one, which isn't currently possible in Swift[2].

[0] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/lib/Sema/DerivedCon...

`Int` is a regular struct with a single stored property of type `Builtin.Word` . But the latter is a magical compiler built-in. Source for integer types is generated from this template - https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/9da65ca0a15fdf341649c994b0a77ec3b71f2687/stdlib/public/core/IntegerTypes.swift.gyb