Swift Alternatives

swift reviews and mentions

• Swift ARC Doesn’t Scan the Heap — I Removed strong_release from SIL to Prove It
  2 projects | dev.to | 20 Aug 2026

  Swift SIL specification

• Swift 6.3 Released
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2026

  Beyond the marketing view... here are the (incomplete) changes:

    https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

• Why Swift Sucks as a Functional Language
  1 project | dev.to | 8 Mar 2026

  But even if you set the optimisation level to -Osize or -O as far as I know there is no guarantee that tail calls will be optimised: they aren't mentioned at all in the Writing High-Performance Swift Code article of the Swift documentation, and I have only been able to find an ancient proposal in the Swift Forums regarding this (where they mention Scala's @tailrec by the way) that was apparently closed without being implemented.

• Swift is a more convenient Rust
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2026

  Toady I used GLM 4.7 to port a C++ project of mine to Rust, so I could read and toy with it, to get into the language: https://codeberg.org/RickStanley/agatetepe-rs.

  Really interesting results, not sure how well it is written but works. I was quite found of Rust syntax; it certainly is not as convoluted as C++ (in my opinion).

  Then I read this article. Since I was already eye-balling Swift for some time, I decided to give it a try, this time, without much of A. I. assistance, if I could help it.

  I'm using an qcow2 Debian trixie arm image in UTM as playground. I found out that there is no packaging for Debian at the time of this writing: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/issues/60690. No problem! They have a script for installing: https://www.swift.org/install/linux/

      curl -O https://download.swift.org/swiftly/linux/swiftly-$(uname -m).tar.gz && \

• Kotlin's Rich Errors: Native, Typed Errors Without Exceptions
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2026

  Source code: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/256ff127c93d7e59a75f...

  I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant when they claimed that "Result of yours is a Result (e, t) in Haskell." In Haskell, `(e, t)` would be the pair type (the binary product type).

• I self-host a time-sorted list of top posts on STEM and Arts and Design
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Nov 2025

  Apple does provide a "permissive guardrail mode" as per:

  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels/i...

  This does end up allowing some texts to work. However, it still failed for some other ones. That's when I gave up on using Apple's foundation models and switched to the Qwen3 8b model which had no such issues. It's pretty sad how the Foundation Models have so much potential but Apple has severely neutered them.

  I originally tried the apple foundation models on my newer mac with m4 chip and once I had the issue with their guardrails, I decided to just switch to Qwen model which runs on Intel and used my old Mac mini for it.

  An issue I ran into was that my Swift app was intermittently crashing. Root cause were two issues:

  1. First one had to do with accessing the SQLite database from multiple threads. Apparently, for multi-threading use, SQLite needed to be initialized with a `SQLITE_OPEN_FULLMUTEX` flag.

  2. Second one was a "Bad file descriptor" error from the macOS operating system itself. Had to do with a possible bug in Process.run() which would cause it to crash after some time:

  https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/issues/57827

  Was able to fix it using the above workaround/solution of "fileHandleForReading.close()".

  Lets see how long the site stays alive now without crashing :)

  Feel free to ask questions.

• From Swift to Machine Code
  1 project | dev.to | 18 Nov 2025

  And it's all open source! You can go wade into the swiftlang/swift repository if you're feeling brave. For a slightly less terrifying deep dive, check the official Swift compiler documentation.

• MacBook Lid Angle Sensor
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Oct 2025
• Systems Programming with Zig (Book)
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Oct 2025

  Swift is mostly runtime-enforced now but there are a lot of cultural affinities (for lack of a better term) between Swift and Rust and there’s a proposal to add ownership https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/main/docs/OwnershipM...

• Swift 6.2 Released
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2025
• A note from our sponsor - Kargo
  akuity.io | 8 Sep 2026

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