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Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

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Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#161

Post by MBCook »

mplewis9z wrote: post #151
alberth wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the macOS kernel (Mach) ever be rewritten in Swift? And if so, what benefit would it provide?

I doubt the entire kernel would - there are low-level, memory-unsafe operations that an operating system performs that Swift _could_ do, but it would be fighting the design of the language and likely not a great trade-off for the kernel developers. But pieces absolutely could be. The benefit would be compile-time checking for memory safety issues (reducing crashes) and language-level concurrency (fewer race condition…

I believe all the code on the Secure Enclave is now Swift. I believe they use a special mode/analyzers to ensure only the “ok” stuff is used. Perhaps no memory allocation, for example.

It sounds to me like Apple would like Swift, perhaps with some extra tooling, to be able to handle the Mach kernel. I don’t know if they’ll go that far though.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#162

Post by zozbot234 »

dcow wrote: post #70
rattray wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Asking as someone who's never programmed with Swift or Rust, but is familiar with the syntax/ideas of each, I'm curious why you say that?

If you don't care about performance and "zero cost abstractions" and are more interested in Rust for its memory safety, then most of your Rust programs end up with a lot of syntactic and library bloat to add those "costly" (but convenient) abstractions back in, like explicitly cloning or wrapping types in Rc and Arc or just always taking ownership of borrowed data by constructing owned types with it. And then there a…

> Alternatively, it would be neat to see some effort put behind a "convenient rust" type of compile mode for modules where you could compile with things like implied clones, unified owned vs reference types, auto-arc/box, etc.

If you can come up with a precise transform from "convenient/sloppy rust" to the underlying language, it can already be implemented via proc macros and the #[attributes] syntax. This is how async programming was prototyped in Rust before it became part of the language proper.

Though I'm not sure it's fair to describe Rc, Arc, Cow etc. as "library bloat". It certainly adds some boilerplate, but it's designed to stay manageable.

(Arguably, good coding practice should also informally document why the Rc, etc. is needed and can't be refactored away, i.e. what parts of the program are controlling the lifetime of each Rc'd object.)

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#163

Post by Apocryphon »

frizlab wrote: post #69
pkulak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift is great because it's the only alternative to Objective C. I don't really think anyone is clamoring for it to move into non-Apple domains.

I know I do. Swift is an amazing language, truly.

How so?

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#164

Post by mrtksn »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

It’s pleasant to use, that’s the main thing about Swift.

A very Apple thing to be honest, so just like most of the Apple products it’s very good in few thing and good enough in others and probably nothing is completely new.

The overall experience is pleasant. Apple is building just as pleasant tooling around it, Swift Playgrounds is amazing for example. Newbies can learn coding by doing some exercises disguised as games but that’s not what’s amazing, what’s amazing is that you can make full apps with all the libraries and Swift packages and SwiftUI. Apple did good job hiding the boilerplate away, did good job removing the decision making about the project file structure and created an intuitive interface where you can just code without worrying about anything else.

In 2020s, Swift is probably the only language with tooling that lets you just code your ideas and deploy without dealing with anything else. Like creating a Word document and writing your thoughts down straightforward.

I don’t know if submitting from Swift Playgrounds to the AppStore has been released but the beta I was trying last month had this functionality. From idea to market, start to finish integration.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#165

Post by penjelly »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

swift isnt new, but yeah i agree its not as exciting to think about as rust or Go. I think i prefer it over some of the oddities from TS, but certainly over js.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#166

Post by meindnoch »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

For one, Swift is not a scripting language.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#167

Post by Faark »

smoldesu wrote: post #122
w10-1 wrote: post #112

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation The news is actually that Apple is now instead trying to define the bits/parts to support via Swift on all platforms (the original API's will always be supported on Darwin). The announ…

It simply sounds like there isn't much demand for Swift from the Open Source community. Apple certainly makes a big push for it internally, but outside their platform, Swift doesn't have much momentum. If Apple wants people to use Swift like a first-class runtime, they should stop treating third-parties like second-class citizens. They have $200 billion dollars in cold, hard cash - surely some of it could go towards…

How great are the IDEs over there for Swift? A quick search indicates jetbrains just shut down theirs, apple.com/swift/ really screams "this is apple stuff" and swift.org/getting-started/ seems like they use VS2019 to build on windows, but nothing about use as IDE. There is a VS Code extension with 80k installs, though.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#168

Post by matthewmacleod »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

Swift doesn't really have to be "genuinely innovative" – it's a modern, ergonomic language which is pretty easy to pick up and and use, has decent performance and a solid type system combined along with the familiarly of a C-like imperative language. It has pretty obvious usability and expressiveness benefits relative to Objective C while being designed for effective interoperability with a massive existing set of codebases.

It actually feels quite a lot like Rust to write it. They're obviously designed for two different use-cases – Apple platform development versus safe systems programming, but they share a lot of similarities in other ways.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#169

Post by justahuman74 »

smoldesu wrote: post #122
w10-1 wrote: post #112

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation The news is actually that Apple is now instead trying to define the bits/parts to support via Swift on all platforms (the original API's will always be supported on Darwin). The announ…

It simply sounds like there isn't much demand for Swift from the Open Source community. Apple certainly makes a big push for it internally, but outside their platform, Swift doesn't have much momentum. If Apple wants people to use Swift like a first-class runtime, they should stop treating third-parties like second-class citizens. They have $200 billion dollars in cold, hard cash - surely some of it could go towards…

1st class support for Linux is a must. It's a pain to distribute anything you write in swift (unless you can now statically-link?)

By this a mean common distros like Debian Stable must have a package for core libs, going to https://www.swift.org/download/ doesn't cut it.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#170

Post by Gigachad »

smoldesu wrote: post #157
Gigachad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its still fewer backdoors and more controlled.

More controlled by who?

Apple. They now gatekeep access rather than it being open to anyone with the money to hack the platform.
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