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Rust VS Apple Swift

Compare Rust VS Apple Swift and see what are their differences

Rust logo Rust

A safe, concurrent, practical language

Apple Swift logo Apple Swift

Swift is a programming language for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS apps that builds on the best of C...
  • Rust Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-09

We recommend LibHunt Rust for discovery and comparisons of trending Rust projects.

  • Apple Swift Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-23

Rust features and specs

  • Memory Safety
    Rust’s ownership system guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector, preventing common bugs such as null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races.
  • Performance
    Rust aims to provide memory safety while maintaining high performance. It is often as fast as C and C++ due to zero-cost abstractions.
  • Concurrency
    Rust's ownership and type system make it easier to write safe concurrent code, helping developers avoid concurrency issues.
  • Tooling
    Rust has excellent tooling, including the Cargo package manager and build system, and Rustfmt for code formatting.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Rust has a growing community and ecosystem, with active contributions and a wide range of libraries and frameworks available.
  • Strong Typing and Error Handling
    Rust’s type system and pattern matching compel developers to handle errors and edge cases, leading to more robust and predictable code.

Possible disadvantages of Rust

  • Learning Curve
    Rust’s advanced features such as its ownership system and lifetimes can be difficult for beginners to grasp, making it harder to learn compared to some other languages.
  • Compilation Time
    Rust can have longer compilation times, especially for large codebases, which can slow down the development process.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Although growing, Rust's ecosystem is not yet as mature as those of more established languages like JavaScript, Python, or even C++, leading to fewer available libraries and frameworks for certain tasks.
  • Complexity of Code
    The strictness of Rust's borrow checker can lead to more complex and verbose code as developers explicitly manage ownership and lifetimes.
  • Tool and Library Development
    Despite the rapid growth, some tools and libraries are still under development or lack the polish of their counterparts in more mature languages.

Apple Swift features and specs

  • Performance
    Swift is designed to be fast and efficient, often outperforming older languages such as Objective-C. This is due to its modern architecture and LLVM compiler, which optimizes code during the compile time.
  • Safety
    Swift provides safety features like optional types and automatic memory management, which help developers avoid common programming errors. This reduces the risk of runtime crashes and enhances code stability.
  • Syntax
    Swift has a clean and expressive syntax, making it easy to read and write. This simplicity reduces the learning curve for new developers and improves code maintainability.
  • Interoperability with Objective-C
    Swift is designed to easily coexist with Objective-C. Developers can integrate Swift code into existing Objective-C projects seamlessly, facilitating gradual transitions to modern Swift codebases.
  • Active Community and Support
    Swift benefits from Apple's strong backing and a growing community of developers. This provides extensive resources, community support, and continuous updates to improve the language.

Possible disadvantages of Apple Swift

  • ABI Stability
    Swift's ABI (Application Binary Interface) was only stabilized in Swift 5, which means applications built with prior versions are not binary compatible. This could lead to challenges in maintaining older projects.
  • Limited Language Maturity
    Although Swift has grown rapidly since its release, it's still a relatively young language compared to Objective-C or C++. This immaturity can result in fewer third-party libraries and tools being available.
  • Ecosystem
    Despite recent advancements, Swift lags behind some established languages regarding package management and deployment tools, which can hinder the development experience.
  • Learning Curve for Objective-C Developers
    For developers accustomed to Objective-C, switching to Swift requires learning new paradigms and idioms, which might temporarily slow down productivity.
  • iOS-Centric
    While efforts are being made to use Swift for server-side development and other platforms, its primary adoption and optimization remain focused on Apple's ecosystem, limiting cross-platform capabilities.

Rust videos

Rust Crash Course | Rustlang

More videos:

  • Review - Why You Should & Shouldn't Learn the Rust Programming Language
  • Review - All About Rust

Apple Swift videos

No Apple Swift videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Rust and Apple Swift)
Programming Language
91 91%
9% 9
OOP
91 91%
9% 9
Software Development
0 0%
100% 100
Generic Programming Language

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Rust and Apple Swift

Rust Reviews

Top 5 Most Liked and Hated Programming Languages of 2022
A survey by Stack Overflow reveals that about 83.5% of 90000 developers loved Rust and tagged it to be the most adorable programming language. Rust is that general-purpose programming language that mainly caters to excellent performance and safety. This multi-worldview programming language has syntax similar to that of C++.
Top 10 Rust Alternatives
Several programming languages like Rust are among the popular ones. However, people are in search of some good alternatives to Rust. Therefore, today we will be talking more about the top 10 alternatives to Rust.
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
Rust is a fairly advanced language, so you'll want to master another language or two before learning Rust. But you'll find that learning Rust pays off generously. The average salary for a Rust developer in the U.S. is $105,000 per year.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Apple Swift Reviews

We have no reviews of Apple Swift yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Rust should be more popular than Apple Swift. It has been mentiond 48 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Rust mentions (48)

  • Useful Clippy lints
    Hello! Rust has very useful tool, named Cargo. It helps you compile code, run program, run tests and benches, format code using cargo fmt and lint it using clippy. In this post we'll talk abou Clippy. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Minimalist blog with Zola, AWS CDK, and Tailwind CSS - Part 1
    What are we going to do today? We're going to build a minimalist blog using Zola (built with Rust, btw), AWS CDK, Tailwind CSS, and a tiny bit of Typescript. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • This Tool can remove 98% Bloatware apps
    Effortlessly remove up to 98% of bloatware apps from your Android device without needing root access. Developed in Rust for efficiency and reliability. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • What Language Should I Choose?
    One language that really gave me that feeling was Gleam, it managed to wrap everything I liked about languages such as JS, Rust and even Java into one brilliant type-safe package. Not for a long time before I met Gleam had I wanted to try creating so many different things just to get to the bottom of how this language ticked, as it were. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Learning Rust: Enumerating Excellence
    Let's dive back into Rust! This time we're going to be going through the lesson called "Enums and Pattern Matching". We're going to be looking at inferring meaning with our data, how we can use match to execute different code depending on input and finally we'll have a look at if let. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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Apple Swift mentions (23)

  • macOS Sequoia is certified to Unix 03
    - And the Swift Language - https://swift.org. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Learning Swift: The Basics of iOS Development
    Open Source: Swift is open source, meaning it's free to use and has a growing community. You can find the source code, as well as many resources and discussions on Swift.org. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Differentiable Swift
    So is differentiable Swift a package for Swift or is it part of the Swift standard library? The video says go to swift.org but I can't find any info about differentiable Swift on that site. Source: over 1 year ago
  • How far can you get with Swift and iOS development on Linux?
    You can learn the Swift language, but not iOS development. So after you're done with basics from swift.org, you need to switch to macOS. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Is there a web site I can go to if I want to find the SwiftUI roadmap?
    Like someone mentioned swift.org is a start. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Rust and Apple Swift, you can also consider the following products

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

Elixir - Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible

Kotlin - Statically typed Programming Language targeting JVM and JavaScript

JavaScript - Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions

VS Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft