Swift vs Go vs Rust - which one will win the battle of the future?

2    04 Nov 2016 10:12 by u/bobso03

robotics, machine learning, internet of things, virtual/augmented reality

What is the best one to learn with these subjects in mind? Which one will win out eventually do you feel and why?

7 comments

1 u/SwiftLion 04 Nov 2016 12:34

I gotta say, I'm a huge believer in Swift. Disclaimer, it's the language I work in daily.

It lacks some things that truly functional languages give you, and it permits you to have state if you want it. But, the language uses COW through and through to give you efficient and powerful "value semantics" on larger stuff than ints and floats. The static analyzer and the rules about nullity make a lot of sense, and they provide a guaranteed crash-free experience with only a little extra work on top of the code for the naive case.

Ultimately, too, swift is wicked fast. It's sensible both as a server language and as a client side one, which I absolutely could not say about its predecessor. And IBM's offerings on BlueMix provide the infrastructure that you need to really say that "the industry is behind Swift on the server".

So, you get all the safety and fancy syntax of a new, modern language, but "C++ like" speed at runtime.

1 u/BeniBela 04 Nov 2016 16:13

Why not D?

Or Object Pascal?

0 u/tame 04 Nov 2016 13:34

JavaScript. :P Seriously though, Rust seems pretty good for systems programming.

0 u/GrumpyEconomist 08 Nov 2016 10:19

I started coding C++ about 15 years ago, since then there has always been a language about to overthrow it. It has never been the same language for long, but there has always been one. I lean towards the idea that the languages of the future are C and C++, just like the languages of the past.