Miguel de Icaza: Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake #GodotCon2023
Why Hacker News recommends it
Frequently recommended for an experienced game-engine builder's view on why GC pauses are inevitable and why Swift's approach is appealing.
What it is
Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jlundberg · 2024-03 · on “Embedded Swift on the Raspberry Pi Pico”
Looking forward to trying this out! Another place Swift seem to be getting traction in is godot. Miguel De Icaza’s talk on the topic is highly recommended: [this video]
Strong rec jlundberg · 2026-04 · on “Xogot: Godot for iPad and iPhone”
Miguels work on Swift for Godot is really inspiring. Highly recommend this video for anyone looking for more context: [this video]
Recommends zengid · 2023-12 · on “Murder is a pixel art ECS game engine in C#”
Yes and here is a really great talk from Miguel de Icaza about some of the history of adding C# to game engines, and why he's excited about using Swift in Godot because he claims that Swift's reference counting avoids the issues of GC pauses. [this video]
Recommends Decabytes · 2024-01 · on “Apple hiring compiler developers for improving Swift / C++ interoperability”
Miguel de Icaza’s video^1 Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake got me interested in Swift. It starts around 12:30 1. [this video]
Recommends rescripting · 2024-09 · on “Swift 6”
Something like this? [LINK] > SwiftGodot can be used to either build an extension that can be added to an existing Godot project, where your code is providing services to the game engine, or it can be used as an API with SwiftGodotKit which embeds Godot as an application that is driven directly from Swift. Miguel de Icaza gave a great talk on Swift + Godot (among other things) [this video]
Recommends perennialmind · 2025-07 · on “.NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution”
Dotnet's GC has a real latency problem. Miguel de Icaza gave a nice talk on why noticeable pauses are inevitable in a stop-the-world tracing GC, proposing Swift's reference-counting GC as the viable alternative [1]. Still, there are recent developments (Satori GC) with the promise to make the worst case far more palatable (e.g. 250ms -> 5ms) [2]. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Recommends KolmogorovComp · 2026-07 · on “Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap”
Ah it's from 2023, Miguel de Icaza : Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake: [this video] Highly recommend.
Cites syndeo · 2024-09 · on “Swift 6”
Nope; no having to pause execution and clean up. Miguel de Icaza (the creator of Mono) explicitly mentions this as one of Swift's key strengths over GC languages like C# during a talk about Swift at GodotCon 2023: [this video]