Swift is a more convenient Rust

Summary

Swift is a more convenient Rust (originally published on my old blog) I’ve been learning Rust lately. Rust is one of the most loved languages out there, is fast, and has an amazing community. Rust invented the concept of ownership as a solution memory management issues without resorting to something slower like Garbage Collection or Reference Counting. But, when you don’t need to be quite as low level, it gives you utilities such as Rc, Arc and Cow to do reference counting and “clone-on-right” in your code. And, when you need to go lower-level still, you can use the unsafe system and access raw C pointers. Rust also has a bunch of awesome features from functional languages like tagged enums, match expressions, first class functions and a powerful type system with generics. Rust has an LLVM-based compiler which lets it compile to native code and WASM. I’ve also been doing a bit of Swift programming for a couple of years now. And the more I learn Rust, the more I see a reflection of Swift. (I know that Swift stole a lot of ideas from Rust, I’m talking about my own perspective here). Swift, too, has awesome features from functional languages like tagged enums, match expressions and first-class functions. It too has a very powerful type system with generics. Swift too gives you complete type-safety without a garbage collector. By default, everything is a value type with “copy-on-write” semantics. But when you need extra speed you can opt into an ownership system and “move” values to avoid copying. And if you need to go even lower level, you can use the unsafe system and access raw C pointers. Swift has an LLVM-based compiler which lets it compile to native code and WASM. #Deja Vu? You’re probably feeling like you just read the same paragraphs twice. This is no accident. Swift is extremely similar to Rust and has most of the same feature-set. But there is a very big difference is perspective. If you consider the default memory model, this will start to make a lot of sens...