alt Hacker NewsWell, it was a terrible idea in any case unless it was for high-level-ish code only. Swift generally can't compete with C++ in raw performance (in the same way as Java - yeah, there are benchmarks where it's faster, but it basically doesn't happen in real programs).
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jabwd • today at 1:02 AM
Hurray for micro benchmarks. Anyway, every language can be abused. I can make Java run slower than Ruby. Given that it runs on Microcontrollers on billions of devices, I don't think Swift is necessarily the problem in whatever case you have in mind (And yes I stole oracle's java marketing there for Swift, it is true though.)
Performance wasn't really the issue here though. The issue was that Swift's C++ interop is still half-baked and kept breaking the build. You can write a perfectly fast browser in Swift for the non-hot-path stuff, which is most of a browser. They killed it because the tooling wasn't ready, not because the language is slow.