[swift-evolution] Swift-based Metal Shading Language

[Goffredo Marocchi]

Sent from my iPhone

On 10 Jul 2016, at 08:50, Georgios Moschovitis <george.moschovitis at icloud.com> wrote:

>> working on C++ compatibility/interaction is  still quite key because of the mountains of legacy and new code still written everyday in it.
> 
> Totally agree, but C++ interoperability is orthogonal to my original request. Would love to have both!
> 
>> Also, I think that the right language for the right domain and being able to glue them together is quite key in the modern computing world and using a single language in every computing domain is a chimera that can bring more pain than good.
> 
> I disagree. IMO, the ‘babel’ of programming languages is one of the most annoying problems in our industry. Besides, I don’t see how C++ is any more suitable than Swift for GPU/heterogenous stuff (without peculiar extensions like CUDA). Swift is starting from a clean-slate, and could definitely become a ‘right’ language for this domain.

Also, call me when we get a port of either OpenCL or CUDA bindings in Swift. Hint: it is more likely for Swift to have working C++ integration first than to wait for those to happen.

We can talk about Swift, Rust, Kotlin, Eiffel, Scala, etc... but they are still relatively niche and before any of those gets anywhere near the strong worldwide cross platform following that JavaScript (with the explosion of Node.JS too), Ruby, C/C++, Java, and C#/.NET still have, we will need to keep nurturing and strengthening this language and tools for a while longer.