Isolated(any)

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

peterspath

24 points

4 comments

nshipster.comTechstory

heatednegative

Debate

80/100

Swift Programming LanguageLanguage DesignConcurrency Management

Key topics

Swift Programming Language

Language Design

Concurrency Management

The article discusses the 'isolated(any)' feature in Swift, sparking debate among commenters about the language's complexity and design decisions.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

Peak period

3-4h

Avg / period

1.3

Key moments

01Story posted
Sep 1, 2025 at 11:37 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Sep 1, 2025 at 1:19 PM EDT
2h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
2 comments in 3-4h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Sep 1, 2025 at 4:56 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (4 comments)

Showing 4 comments

aaronbrethorst

4 months ago

2 replies

This feels like a great example of how wildly overcomplicated Swift has gotten in the past few years. I'm not sure exactly what the right time for Swift to have said 'enough' might have been, but I do know it needs a Snow Leopard [0] release.

In particular, I'd love to see the language designers spend a year simply improving compiler error messages. I don't spend a lot of time building iOS apps these days, and the inscrutability of the compiler's messaging turns that into a vicious cycle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

rockbruno

4 months ago

I think Swift Concurrency is a great idea that unfortunately wasn't executed very well. The motivation behind it is that concurrency is difficult to understand and tricky to get right, but Swift Concurrency is at times even more difficult to understand and has even more pitfalls and gotchas compared to old-school synchronization primitives. I don't know where exactly it went wrong but it does feel that they really overcomplicated this feature.

frizlab

4 months ago

They are actually working on that now with approchable concurrency[1].

[1]https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/visio...

ohdeargodno

4 months ago

And thus grows the ever increasing list of reserved keywords in Swift. All for a badly designed feature. Along with another pile of crap on top, approachable concurrency, that will still work weirdly and be prone to so many bugs and impossible to understand behaviours.

Swift's insistence on having NIH syndrome made them ignore all proper concurrency management systems of the past fifteen years. What's that, structured concurrency, Erlang's lightweight processes, Project Loom, goroutines? all better concurrency systems than anything Apple has ever put forward, all publicly available in the form of implementation or research paper years before.

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ID: 45093590Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:47:02 PM

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