I remember this being shown in Nintendo Power. As the kind of kid who liked computers and gadgets I really wanted one, and read the article many times.
They have either recently added or talked about a borrow style system in the language as a way to avoid more copies and speed things up/lower memory usage/help with asynchronous programming.
In the last year they’ve added improvements to the type checker to speed it up, those would have been released now.
They have further and much more significant changes that I think might have recently landed in the development version. That should make an even bigger difference. But it’s not in a released version yet.
And yes, none of us like that one part of Swift. Especially the DRASTIC difference compared to objective-C which really only checked syntax and little else.
It’s still probably my favorite language right now though I don’t get to write in it much.
They’ve been doing it for years. I don’t remember how we first knew, but I know they’ve been using Swift in kernels for at least some of the other chips like the Secure Enclave or whatever.
I’m not sure exactly which. I assume it’s some of the code and not all. But it’s not new in the abstract.
That said I don’t think I’ve heard of it in the kernel of MacOS on the main processor. That may be new.
Either way this is certainly the most concrete announcement I remember them ever giving on this stuff.
I know internally they use an IPsec implementation written by Rust (I think in the iCloud infra). Heard this from an ex-Apple engineer Ben (forgot his last name) that did a wonderful presentation of Rust from first principles. He said that it was hard to get people in on Rust when most would argue for Swift.
Some stuff was discussed at Meet with Apple security event a few months ago, and the talks on FoundationDB rewrite, or why Swift Embedded subset came to be.
However I miss them actually having had one of those 15 - 30m WWDC sessions, where they could have gone a bit deeper into the keynote examples
Ooh fantastic. I’ve been using date ranges plus GIST indexes for like a decade to do this. It’s really nice. But the lack of foreign keys can be painful. I’ve resorted to stored procedures for crates and updates to ensure everything is done right and enforced.
The FK piece is what I'm most excited about. PRIMARY KEY WITHOUT OVERLAPS plus FOREIGN KEY ... PERIOD means a child row's range is enforced to stay inside an actual parent version, no triggers or sprocs needed. Not free (GiST lookups add up on hot tables), but for slowly changing dimensions it kills a whole class of footgun.
Budgets generally make it impossible. Any “commercial” game costs enough no one seems to be willing to risk it unless they think it will pay back big. Often seemingly by making the game bigger (thus more expensive) to appeal to more people.
Much like Hollywood.
Combine on the trend mentality and rent seeking (live service shooters?) and it sucks.
I really liked the PS1 and 2 eras.
PS1 was cheap to develop for relative to cartridges, and Sony just wanted games. They published so many cool and experimental things. Even brought over stuff like that from Japan.
PS2 moved away from that some but we still got fun stuff. No one would ever publish Guitaroo Man today.
Once you hit the HD era budgets started skyrocketing, team size, and it never got better.
I agree indie is where much of the fun is. Some big games are still great. But so much cool stuff is in the indie scene.
They could be publishing that. Not every PS5 game needs to look jaw dropping.
MS helped the rise of indies big time with XBLA. Don’t know why they threw that away. But their business plan hasn’t made sense since the 360 era.
I remember being taught in my COBOL class (early 2000s, needed an elective, thought it would be fun) that that was the point.
The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.
That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.
I don’t think it’s performative. That seems really uncharitable. Seems like most “performative“ accusations are.
I think a ton of people were REALLY misinformed about how much water AI data centers use. I know I was at one point.
Now there may be people pushing that narrative still on purpose because it clearly works. But I don’t think the average person who uses that talking point is doing anything other than expressing a concern based on the (terrible) information they got somewhere.
I stand by it. If you only care about the climate for things that are socially rewarded (being anti-AI is, telling your friends to about the impact of eating beef or taking flights or other day to day activities is boooo you're being a buzzkill), you are being performative.
There's a reason certain types of misinformation become popular and others fizzle. The environmental concerns around AI are starting from the goal 'disliking AI' and going in search of a reason for many people. The environment is a convenient reason because it links to an existing left-wing cause & doesn't require conceding the frame of AI rapidly becoming extremely capable (scary! don't like to think about that!) so it's all comfort and outrage without stakes.
But of course it never came out.
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