171–180 of 402 posts
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Considering that both Google and Apple are cardholding members of PRISM, it sounds like a bit of a frying pan vs fire situation to me.
Yes, but that's OUR surveillance and we're cool with that
When you're own government's security services are spying on you, they own you.
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More controlled by who?
Apple. They now gatekeep access rather than it being open to anyone with the money to hack the platform.
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…
Apple's thing is innovation - taking technology that exists but is clunky and making it accessible.
Swift is intended to be a more accessible alternative to Objective-C. It is memory safe (reference counted like Objective-C's ARC but built into the language) and type-safe, and has modern features such as named parameters, generics, duck typing, closures, multiple values, inline arrays and dictionaries, etc.. It's intended for writing user apps, but is also suitable for writing system frameworks. It also has some (possibly overly) clever syntactic sugar that has enabled SwiftUI's pseudo-declarative API.
Regarding memory safety we have: Swift (mostly reference counting), Rust (mostly compile-time checks), Java (mostly garbage collection), and C++ (smart pointers or manual/unsafe.)
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Afaik Swift is pretty close to using Rc and Arc everywhere. Does swift do some more escape analysis than Rust?
Swift only uses reference counting when working with objects; Structs are optimised using copy-on-write. There's currently work on implementing move and ownership semantics, similar to Rust, but opt-in rather than by default.
Swift structs are just like C structs (from a memory perspective). The copy-on-write thing is implemented manually by storing a private refcounted object in your struct. See the implementation of Array for example: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/stdlib/public/core/...
There’s no magical copy-on-write mechanism at the language level.
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 co…
Swift might not change the industry, but it makes life easier for anyone who wants to develop on an Apple platform but finds Objective-C unwieldy. Also it provides a path for Apple to migrate its platforms to memory-safe languages, which can reduce bugs and security vulnerabilities.
I don't think it would be worth my time to even buy a other macOS device to port my framework.
I don't think they will get any benefit from this.
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…
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.
#!/usr/bin/env swift
print("hello, world!")Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one, Swift is not a scripting language.
Swift certainly can be a scripting language. #!/usr/bin/env swift print("hello, world!")
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Aside from Swift having automatic reference counting, and Rust relying more heavily on its borrow checker, Swift and are super similar languages. If what you want is an ergonomic language that lets you combine the best of ML type systems with C family imperative programming then they’re the two obvious choices.
I would not describe Rust as being particularly ergonomic. While it is a suitable replacement for C++, that is not necessarily a high standard to meet.
Writing Rust applications is also very ergonomic. The Rust web server frameworks are approaching the ergonomics of Typescript web server frameworks.
The only Rudy lacking ergonomics is writing net new frameworks or missing framework pieces, or when std is not available.
95%+ of all new Rust code will fall into the bucket of “ergonomic to write and read”.