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Swift 5: start your engines

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Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#11

Post by Osmium »

ainar-g wrote: post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

Swift has a clear policy on this, but basically: it's worth breaking things early on rather than freeze in bad design decisions. They provide a code migrator to help with this pain.

However, this was only in the early releases. The plan is to stop breaking changes soon and freeze the ABI. They're a little behind schedule for this, but it should happen soon.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#12

Post by [deleted] »

ainar-g wrote: post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

[deleted]

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#13

Post by jorgemf »

saagarjha wrote: post #5
ainar-g wrote: post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

> Do people enjoy rewriting code? No, of course not. The way I see it, Swift is scared to go the "Java" route where backwards compatibility is valued above all else, leaving the language an antiquated mess.

I want to know the opinion of managers about what they think when they have to rewrite the app everytime there is a new release.

I remember all the time the iOs developer spent with every iOs release. He didn't look any happy

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#14

Post by eridius »

ainar-g wrote: post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

Swift 3 was a major backwards-incompatible change. It came with an automatic migration tool, but the tool only kind of worked.

Swift 4 is a much smaller change. There are backwards-incompatible standard library changes, but not on the scope of Swift 3. Again, it comes with an automatic migration tool. I haven't tried it myself, but I'm optimistic that it will work much better, both because they've had a year to fix what went wrong the first time, and because the changes are much much smaller.

But Xcode 9 also supports Swift 3.2, which is the same language as Swift 3.1 with some miscellaneous bugs fixed and with the iOS 11 / macOS High Sierra SDKs. Your Swift 3.1 code will likely run under Swift 3.2 with no changes, and any changes that are necessary are going to be strictly due to SDK changes rather than language changes.

Xcode 9 also supports mixing Swift 3.2 and Swift 4 modules. You can have your application written in Swift 3.2 and use a library written in Swift 4, or vice versa. This means you have a full year to migrate to Swift 4 (since I assume Xcode 10 will drop Swift 3.2 support, though this is pure speculation).

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#15

Post by jswny »

Can someone with Swift experience comment on the status of Swift on non-Apple platforms? Is it being used outside of the Apple ecosystem? How is the tooling, deployment, availability/support, etc.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#16

Post by eridius »

jorgemf wrote: post #13
saagarjha wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people enjoy rewriting code? No, of course not. The way I see it, Swift is scared to go the "Java" route where backwards compatibility is valued above all else, leaving the language an antiquated mess.

I want to know the opinion of managers about what they think when they have to rewrite the app everytime there is a new release. I remember all the time the iOs developer spent with every iOs release. He didn't look any happy

You don't have to "rewrite the app". You run the migrator, then fix up what it didn't migrate.

Swift 3 was notorious for having migrator issues, largely due to the fact that it was a pretty radical change and a huge number of method names were changed.

Personally, on our hybrid app, the migrator did about 1/3rd of the work, and I did the rest, without any other engineers' involvement. Overall it took maybe 3 days to migrate the whole app.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#17

Post by __sr__ »

brian_herman wrote: post #4
__sr__ wrote: post #2

I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

https://github.com/vapor/vapor

It's not just about a framework. Some marketing/evangelism is needed. Those factors were major contributors to the rise of Go.

And the Swift community itself needs to work on making it officially available on more platforms. Officially, the only non-Apple platform that is supported is Ubuntu -- not Linux, Ubuntu. It runs on other distributions, but having “official” support for more platforms would be a big step towards acceptability. Most people I've talked to still consider Swift on Linux an experiment. Even C#/.Net Core seem to be more popular on Linux.

Having Windows support would make the language more acceptable by cross platform developers -- leading to more high quality libraries being written.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#18

Post by craigching »

brian_herman wrote: post #4
__sr__ wrote: post #2

I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

https://github.com/vapor/vapor

With a name like 'vapor', I thought this was some sort of joke. But this looks like fun! https://vapor.codes. An example from that page:

  import Vapor
  
  let drop = try Droplet()
  
  drop.get("hello") { req in
      return "Hello, world."
  }
  
  try drop.run()

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#19

Post by xenadu02 »

ainar-g wrote: post #3

Maybe someone will explain this to me. Does Swift use this confusing "rapid release" versioning? Does Swift 4 break backwards compatibility with Swift 3? In my company people are looking for a language to rewrite some legacy Objective-C to. Swift is often discarded as "unstable" because of these major version bumps. Compare this to Go, which, seven or so years after the initial release is still 1.x and still doesn't…

The Swift 4 compiler has a Swift 3.2 mode that is 99.9% source compatible with Swift 3.x. Further you can link 3.2 and 4.0 binaries together. This allows a phased upgrade approach that was not possible in earlier releases.

Swift 5 is about having a stable binary interface so you can link against pre-compiled code going forward. In other words a Swift 6/7/8 binary can link against one compiled with Swift 5.

The bar for source breaking changes is also much higher than the already high bar in Swift 4. We may not see any source breaking changes in Swift 5.

Re: Swift 5: start your engines

#20

Post by xenadu02 »

__sr__ wrote: post #2

I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.

Swift is open-source. You are welcome to contribute support for other platforms!
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