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

Post by moloch-hai » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 2:01 AM UTC

manmal wrote: post #147

password1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Swift and Rust are competing on the same grounds or for the same objective? Genuinely curious, i don't know much about Rust.

I watched a Rust intro video recently that provided a perspective I liked, so I’ll share that here: MS, Apple, Google (and more) all relied heavily on C for low level code that needed to be as performant as possible. It turned out though that C‘s memory management is so problematic that many/most security issues are caused by it. To address that, Google invented Go, Apple made Swift, Mozilla gave us Rust etc. MS is i…

Post by moloch-hai » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 2:05 AM UTC

Octokiddie wrote: post #141

The article quotes this: > With a native Swift implementation of Foundation, the framework no longer pays conversion costs between C and Swift, resulting in faster performance. and this: > A reimplementation of Calendar in Swift is 1.5x to 18x as fast as the C one (calling from Swift in various synthetic benchmarks like creation, date calculation). First, that range of 1.5x-18x is kind of huge. Why? Second, why would…

Post by latexr » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #217

hinkley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really should have started using Long Bets years ago. Ten years ago a “Tanya” told me she would never use an ebook to read literature. I’m pretty sure if I went to her house today I’d find 2. In fact I may be the only person I know who doesn’t own one (not wanting one and being fundamentally against them are two different things). That’s the most memorable but I’ve had these sorts of “over my dead body” conversatio…

I'm confused by the idea of searching someone's house for ebooks. Does that include PDFs?

Post by WFHRenaissance » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 2:14 AM UTC

cute_boi wrote: post #204

mark_l_watson wrote: post #198

Good for Apple. In my opinion they are laying the groundwork for reducing technical debt. Objective-C had a good run. I haven’t used Objective-C in over 10 years but I have used Swift about 10% of the time in the last four years. Swift is a nicely designed language and I could see it supporting Apple’s business for many years. Will Swift ever be a primary language on Linux? I would say yes, except now that Rust is us…

I would recommend people always use language like Rust or C++ instead of swift, so that it is easy to make cross-platform apps. The UI can be made using a native toolkit like swift, gtk, winapi, etc... however, the core engine app should be written in a language like Rust.

Post by sixstringtheory » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 2:17 AM UTC

nmfisher wrote: post #229

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 not Objective-C" is pretty much the only advantage it has. You're not missing anything, it's basically a superfluous language that only exists in its current form because Objective C needed replacing and Apple would never adopt a language they didn't have effective control over. Language-wise, I see zero benefit over Rust, possibly Go (I'm not familiar enough to comment) or even JVM-less Kotlin. But hey, we're…