Hey there, we are looking to develop our own layer 1 blockchain. We're splitting the responsibilities for origination, clearing, and settlement across three independent but cooperating node networks. We've gotten our Proof of Concept up using Ruby on Rails for the nodes, you can see it as the attached link. So far, so good. Now we are looking to convert it into a distributable and are trying to figure out which language is the best for this.
Essentially our needs from the language are: solid networking tools and speed, very fast execution of basic actions, some parallel execution, and able to compile the end product into an easy to distribute and use package for end users.
I was learning Rust, but I have a healthy amount of experience with Swift and right now, it's only me coding. I've only done iOS coding, but have built a fintech app from scratch that's now in the app store so I'm pretty familiar with the language and its benefits. Haven't experimented with Vapor or any of the application development tools, and I wanted to know if it is a crazy idea to develop a blockchain node in Swift instead.
Pick Rust. Rust can provide all what you need and has been a major language in blockchain/cryptocurrency industry. Swift is slower than Rust and does not have such support in the networking and domain field. Swift tooling is great only on macOS, therefore you are likely to have troubles on other platforms.
You can use swift of course. It’s more of a question of being performant.
You really want to try some basic operations and find what’s most performant for you.
Rust is wonderful for cloud applications requiring heavy concurrency, it has compile time checking for such things.
Go and C++ could be more performant in your case. Swift is really quite an obtuse language, with a lot of features, some which may complicate your implementation.
Also, you want to consider the market of developers who could help build it. If you use Go or C++ there is a larger collection of people who know the languages than there is with swift.
How is Go more performant than Swift? Features are to be used wisely, like any engineer can do. Go actually lacks useful features, you'll find the language very "poor" compared to Swift. The latter is a joy to use, not Go.
