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Nowadays being rewritten into Swift.

"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB" by Konrad Malawski (Strange Loop 2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQc9-seU-5k



That was an experiment the team didn’t end up committing to - it’s been backed out. That said it was a fascinating dive into the flexibility of Swift, and the Konrad’s talk is excellent and worth watching.

https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/commit/e52fc3621fd5e41...


Interesting, thanks for sharing, is there a rationale somewhere?

As someone that enjoys using C++ despite all its warts, I can imagine a few reasons, but would nonetheless an interesting read, in case that is public.

I guess that experience might also had an impact on ongoing Swift 6+ features.


The Ladybird project started a similar journey, and indeed they are mainly waiting on Swift 6+ features as documented in their blockers issue: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933


I don’t know the specific reasons (and the pull request referenced in the merge commit appears to have been deleted), but my guess is that the extra complexity vs using modern C++ features was not worthwhile to the core FDB team.


Which could be a good reasoning, assuming it is being enforced somehow, in regards to modern best practices, which is usually the main issue.


Indeed - my guess is that there is a policy of "improve things as you touch that area of the codebase" rather than blanket rewriting of working code going on.



Huh, apparently so! It doesn't seem like much has happened since - there certainly aren't many pull requests which reference Swift [0] since it was restored.

[0]: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/pulls?q=is%3Apr+swift




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