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Swift Distributed Actors

swift.org

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Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#31

Post by meheleventyone »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #27
alexashka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are adding features they 'took' to put it kindly from other existing, mature implementations without giving any credit or acknowledgement. Not only that, they expect people to test their beta grade software because they keep releasing it half baked ever since the release of Swift itself. It's embarrassing and it also angers me because these companies have wall gardened their ecosystems to proprietary languages a…

> without giving any credit or acknowledgement You could be forgiven for not being familiar with the Actor model. But if you’re familiar with it, saying that isn’t recognition is bonkers. Everyone who knows what Actors are knows they’re referencing Erlang/OTP.

The model even predates that. It’s like one of the OG concurrency ideas IIRC.

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#32

Post by [deleted] »

alexashka wrote: post #18
watermelon0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed through the blog post, and it seems to me that they are not claiming they invented something new, just that they are adding this to Swift language. (Distributed) actor model is nothing new, but I definitely wouldn't classify it as something that's common in other languages. To my knowledge Erlang/OTP is the only mainstream language where this is part of the standard library. There are implementations for ot…

They are adding features they 'took' to put it kindly from other existing, mature implementations without giving any credit or acknowledgement. Not only that, they expect people to test their beta grade software because they keep releasing it half baked ever since the release of Swift itself. It's embarrassing and it also angers me because these companies have wall gardened their ecosystems to proprietary languages a…

[deleted]

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#33

Post by ternaryoperator »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #17
ternaryoperator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. I hope for this too. I did a personal project in Swift on Linux and found that I loved the language. However, I was greatly frustrated by the lack of libraries. For Swift to reach the mainstream, IMHO, the Swift Foundation needs t…

> MHO, the Swift Foundation needs to move much more of the ecosystem to platforms other than Apple's. I suspect Apple is trying to do this for straightforward reasons like wanting to remain relevant and foster community growth as to retain credibility… while also subtly trying to not encourage the use of Swift as a language for any other GUI framework/platform than Cocoa + macOS. Obviously I don’t have any evidence t…

My understanding (and I invite correction if I'm mistaken) is that the Swift Foundation was created to address the principal concerns you've articulated. But ports have been slow: Linux works but with the previously mentioned lack of libraries, and there is a threadbare port to Windows which barely runs.

The app I was working on was CLI-based that generated a log; and even for that non-UI use case, basic libraries were effectively missing.

It's a shame because it's truly an elegant language.

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#34

Post by xvilka »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #11
DenseComet wrote: post #3

This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.

> I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. I hope for this too. I did a personal project in Swift on Linux and found that I loved the language. However, I was greatly frustrated by the lack of libraries. For Swift to reach the mainstream, IMHO, the Swift Foundation needs t…

I hope not, at least until they solve it being Apple-only. Of course, there's some support for other platforms but it's pretty bad. At this point it's better to invest time and money to the Rust ecosystem.

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#35

Post by dmitriid »

fulafel wrote: post #28

What's the TLDR on why this is a language feature vs a library?

Anything concurrent and distributed you want supported by your runtime a la Erlang.

The reason is: you want certain guarantees. For example, in Erlang you can set up a monitor on a process, and when that process exits for any reason, you get a notification, {EXIT, Reason}. Even if that reason was a catastrophic failure of some sort.

If this is implemented as a library, then the runtime can kill your code at any time, and you'll never know what happened.

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#36

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

darthrupert wrote: post #21
snicker7 wrote: post #9

This sort of language cruft makes me realize that Lisp had it right all along.

Yet somehow the Lisps seem to be doing all sorts of concurrency rather poorly.

Beside Clojure, Common Lisp has nice library addressing this issue — and of course the commercial version have their own too.

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#38

Post by bsaul »

Nice to see swift trying to make a dent in server programming using shiny new features, however i would have liked something on the android side instead.

Being able to reuse code between ios and android, including foundation api, would have made an easy way to grow the user base.

it's going to be hard to put swift in the hands of go or kotlin devs..

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#39

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #32
alexashka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are adding features they 'took' to put it kindly from other existing, mature implementations without giving any credit or acknowledgement. Not only that, they expect people to test their beta grade software because they keep releasing it half baked ever since the release of Swift itself. It's embarrassing and it also angers me because these companies have wall gardened their ecosystems to proprietary languages a…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Swift Distributed Actors

#40

Post by mojuba »

bsaul wrote: post #38

Nice to see swift trying to make a dent in server programming using shiny new features, however i would have liked something on the android side instead. Being able to reuse code between ios and android, including foundation api, would have made an easy way to grow the user base. it's going to be hard to put swift in the hands of go or kotlin devs..

There was once a really nice open source cross-platform framework called Apportable that provided an Obj-C compatibility layer on Android. You could develop your app on iOS and then last moment build it on Android with some minimal changes. I tried it for one of my projects and it worked just great.

Guess what happened to Apportable? It was quietly acquired by Google and completely shut down within days, with practically no traces left on GitHub or the rest of the Internet.

This is because Google will be hostile to any compatibility layer that places iOS in a privileged position and makes Android a second-class citizen, an afterthought in your development process.

With this story in mind, I don't think Apple would step into that territory.

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