Just last night I was watching a video on Jai from Jonathan Blow, and he was showing off how he could compile a game demo of +50k lines from scratch in under 0.5 seconds, with plenty of room left for optimizations.
Which really makes me question if language design is going in the correct direction. Are Swift programs less likely to contain bugs or are they easier to debug? I know that many of Swift's creators are incredibly experienced programming languages experts, so how do they justify this insane compilation tax?
Jai is a lot slower atm than at 2018, and feature-wise it is closer to C than to Swift with 2 different purposes.
Swift compiler time is spend mostly on LLVM stuff and it isn't much slower than other modern LLVM languages (Rust/Julia etc.) <ofc. this don't count this very specific complex type checks that are super slow>
I think the justification is that outside of pathological cases, it allows writing clean code without too many type annotations, and the compiler just figures out everything for you.
Which really makes me question if language design is going in the correct direction. Are Swift programs less likely to contain bugs or are they easier to debug? I know that many of Swift's creators are incredibly experienced programming languages experts, so how do they justify this insane compilation tax?