[Swift-devel] Scala

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sat, 2009-10-24 at 19:51 -0500, Ian Foster wrote:
> Hi Ben:
> 
> I gather you are in Australia at present? Say hello from me.
> 
> I think that the key feature of Swift (apart from functional semantics  
> and XDTM-like mechanisms) is its use of single assignment variables  
> for synchronization.
> 
> I'm not sure that one has to have everything-parallel semantics to do  
> what we want. One could also have explicitly parallel operators, like  
> "forall" and "par" used in CC++.

We could have forall and par in Java, as libraries. Which is something I
would personally like to see regardless of what Swift does. I'm not sure
why Scala would be better (other than being a more interesting but more
obscure language - which is a milder version of the Swift - Java
conflict).

> 
> I remain interested in the question of whether we can reduce barriers  
> to use of Swift, and its long-term maintenance costs, by adopting some  
> existing technology to build on. Scala is one of several potential  
> candidates.

My opinion on that is that what we're trying to address with Swift (as a
language) is for us to deal with the nasty problems of concurrency so
that our users don't have to (questions of whether we succeed at that
notwithstanding).

Choosing Scala or Java instead would mean that, while being able to work
with a more stable and better known language (as well as some of us
having an easier job), our users will have to take care of some of those
harder problems.

Taking the limit, the maintenance costs of doing nothing are pretty low.