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Swift UTF-8 String

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Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#11

Post by saagarjha »

cageface wrote: post #9
phamilton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been eye-ing it for a while at remind.com. Our hangup has been that we're heavily aws focused, but https://github.com/amzn/smoke-aws is looking promising. We're interested because it's one of a handful of statically typed functional programming languages. Haskell/Ocaml are great as ML type languages, but it's a big paradigm shift for a team to jump into. Rust still has a pretty decent learning curve. Swift seem…

Swift is a nice language but I think the reliance on ref counting is going to limit its adoption. You have to work a lot harder to avoid reference cycles in Swift than you do in a garbage collected language. Unless GC latency is a deal breaker for your problem domain it’s not worth the extra effort. My money is on Rust for really low level stuff and Kotlin for anything where JVM overhead is acceptable.

It really depends on what you're doing. A lot of the time, neither garbage collection pauses nor reference cycles are an issue; and when they are it's typical that one or the other will solve the issue.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#12

Post by ilovecaching »

bbrian wrote: post #6
ilovecaching wrote: post #4

Is anyone using Swift outside of Apple specific stuff professionally? When they first announced swift it felt like it might catch on as general purpose gced language. The language itself is quite beautiful in a lot of ways (although being OO was obviously an awful step backwards). But it feels like it's still just the crazy language Apple uses, just like Objective-C was.

Google are beginning to use it for Tensorflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s65BigoMV_I There's a course currently running in University of San Francisco run by Fast.ai which is using Swift-Tensorflow taught by Chris Lattner for two lessons: https://www.usfca.edu/data-institute/certificates/deep-learn... Not exactly what you asked, but pertinent.

I don't expect that will do very well. ML is already crowded, and Python is already solidly at the top. Having worked in ML myself, no one would switch if it meant dealing with a real statically typed language they could hack away at easily in a repl or jupyter notebooks, or access mypy, numpy, scikit, etc. ML is an ecosystem of tools that are all in Python currently.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#13

Post by sonnyblarney »

If I ever wrote a language, handling strings wrt unicode would be the first thing I would fix so so that it's clear, concise and especially consistent.

It bothers me that in 2019 it can still be difficult to manage even basic things with strings, and yet, whenever we talk/argue/bike-shed about 'languages' we get caught up in intellectual meandering. Please, give us strings that make sense. Then argue about monads.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#14

Post by ilovecaching »

phamilton wrote: post #8
ilovecaching wrote: post #4

Is anyone using Swift outside of Apple specific stuff professionally? When they first announced swift it felt like it might catch on as general purpose gced language. The language itself is quite beautiful in a lot of ways (although being OO was obviously an awful step backwards). But it feels like it's still just the crazy language Apple uses, just like Objective-C was.

We've been eye-ing it for a while at remind.com. Our hangup has been that we're heavily aws focused, but https://github.com/amzn/smoke-aws is looking promising. We're interested because it's one of a handful of statically typed functional programming languages. Haskell/Ocaml are great as ML type languages, but it's a big paradigm shift for a team to jump into. Rust still has a pretty decent learning curve. Swift seem…

I don't really consider a language to be functional without a concise application and composition operator (also automatic currying and partial application). How can you be functional if you don't have the basic operators for combining and applying functions?

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#15

Post by ilovecaching »

ilovecaching wrote: post #14
phamilton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been eye-ing it for a while at remind.com. Our hangup has been that we're heavily aws focused, but https://github.com/amzn/smoke-aws is looking promising. We're interested because it's one of a handful of statically typed functional programming languages. Haskell/Ocaml are great as ML type languages, but it's a big paradigm shift for a team to jump into. Rust still has a pretty decent learning curve. Swift seem…

I don't really consider a language to be functional without a concise application and composition operator (also automatic currying and partial application). How can you be functional if you don't have the basic operators for combining and applying functions?

It looks like Swift has automatic currying though, so that's pretty close.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#16

Post by ilovecaching »

cageface wrote: post #9
phamilton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been eye-ing it for a while at remind.com. Our hangup has been that we're heavily aws focused, but https://github.com/amzn/smoke-aws is looking promising. We're interested because it's one of a handful of statically typed functional programming languages. Haskell/Ocaml are great as ML type languages, but it's a big paradigm shift for a team to jump into. Rust still has a pretty decent learning curve. Swift seem…

Swift is a nice language but I think the reliance on ref counting is going to limit its adoption. You have to work a lot harder to avoid reference cycles in Swift than you do in a garbage collected language. Unless GC latency is a deal breaker for your problem domain it’s not worth the extra effort. My money is on Rust for really low level stuff and Kotlin for anything where JVM overhead is acceptable.

What do you see as the advantage of Rust or ref counting?

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#17

Post by peferron »

ilovecaching wrote: post #4

Is anyone using Swift outside of Apple specific stuff professionally? When they first announced swift it felt like it might catch on as general purpose gced language. The language itself is quite beautiful in a lot of ways (although being OO was obviously an awful step backwards). But it feels like it's still just the crazy language Apple uses, just like Objective-C was.

Sibling comments mention Chris Lattner. For readers that might not know him, he's the main inventor of Swift. Him pushing Swift should not necessarily be taken as a sign of general community enthusiasm.

I would love to see more Swift on the backend. It's surprisingly hard to find a language that's concise, expressive, statically typed, and easily accessible to beginners. Swift checks all these boxes.

That being said, it's much easier to succeed on the front-end when the only competitor is Objective-C (see: JavaScript), than on the backend when the competitors are Go, Rust, Elixir, Python, Node, C++, Java and more, all with large ecosystems already in place.

Swift may succeed in a niche, and "Swift for TensorFlow" appears to be an attempt at that, but I don't think it will become ubiquitous (call it traditional HN negativity).

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#18

Post by saagarjha »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #13

If I ever wrote a language, handling strings wrt unicode would be the first thing I would fix so so that it's clear, concise and especially consistent. It bothers me that in 2019 it can still be difficult to manage even basic things with strings, and yet, whenever we talk/argue/bike-shed about 'languages' we get caught up in intellectual meandering. Please, give us strings that make sense. Then argue about monads.

> give us strings that make sense

This is really, really hard.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#19

Post by Razengan »

ilovecaching wrote: post #4

Is anyone using Swift outside of Apple specific stuff professionally? When they first announced swift it felt like it might catch on as general purpose gced language. The language itself is quite beautiful in a lot of ways (although being OO was obviously an awful step backwards). But it feels like it's still just the crazy language Apple uses, just like Objective-C was.

For me, it's the best language for game development that I've seen ever since I wanted to make my own games as a kid.

Re: Swift UTF-8 String

#20

Post by asveikau »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #13

If I ever wrote a language, handling strings wrt unicode would be the first thing I would fix so so that it's clear, concise and especially consistent. It bothers me that in 2019 it can still be difficult to manage even basic things with strings, and yet, whenever we talk/argue/bike-shed about 'languages' we get caught up in intellectual meandering. Please, give us strings that make sense. Then argue about monads.

I don't think a lot of people realize that Unicode itself, in any representation, is complex, and there is no one abstraction that will make it always easy in all cases. So I think your goal is unobtainable.

Some of that complexity is because world languages themselves are not simple. (eg. If you were to ditch Unicode and start from scratch, it would remain hard to do bi-di text, to pick a random example.)

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