The PrimeTime
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2024–2026
1:05:45 · 274K views · Jul 12, 2024
ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.
Cited in Swift discussions for Lattner's account of Swift becoming complex too fast under pressure from Apple's needs.
5 comments from Hacker News
> - Modern Ergonomics What does this even mean? Modern Swift looks like a haphazard mishmash of conflicting features where every problem is solved by "just one more keyword bro". In 2024 it had 217 keywords : [LINK] and that was reduced slightly, to 203, in 2025: [LINK] According to Lattner they never even had the time to design anything due to time pressure from Apple [1]. So Swift ended up with a type system that the compiler can't even check and is impossible to fix. So the compiler routinely just gives up and complains on even the most trivial code. [1] this video --- start quote --- Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff... We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases. --- end quote ---
Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it": this video --- start quote --- Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff... We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases. --- end quote ---
Srs question, I keep reading everywhere from experienced people Wayland sucks. I need to start learning of these stacks, should I go with Wayland or should I go with Xorg? If I didn't know any better I would learn the Wayland API. Just like how: if I didn't know any better I would learn Swift (instead of Objective-C). But thankfully I do know better and I know to stay far away from Swift [1]. Is it the same deal with Xorg/Wayland? It seems like noobs prefer Wayland but the experts prefer Xorg. 1. this video
> About control - serious question: how is this different from for example Rust, Go, Zig or Python? You can ask Chris Lattner about how many many changes were forced through the language before they were ready, or even properly designed, because Apple needed them: this video
At what point in the video does he say that? Edit: this video It's not that Swift itself failed, but that Lattner thinks Swift has become too complex too fast, due to the pressure of a rapidly growing user base.