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Don’t forget that this interoperability was put in place to support a specific engineering goal: to make it possible to slowly (over decades, probably) transition from 4 different languages (C, ObjC, C++, ObjC++) at every level of Apple’s stack towards a single memory-safe successor language.

Would you recommend they wait for some weird Java-esque 100% Pure implementation within the compiler itself before they can begin that work?

The ideal you’re suggesting is actually made more reachable by this work. One can imagine a Swift LLVM/Clang now.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw



Wow, I'm only three minutes in, but it's a good talk. Among other parts of Apple's ecosystem (especially Webkit would make sense to move to Swift for memory safety), imagine if they start incrementally moving llvm/Clang over to Swift using this, that would be very interesting.




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