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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)

#261

Post by MBCook »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #233
MBCook wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC, it is /some/ (not /all/) of the code on the SEP is now Swift. SEPOS's microkernel, etc. is still C.

Ah, I must have been misremembering. Thanks.

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

#262

Post by mrtesthah »

manmal wrote: post #67
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't particularly care, whether or not Swift ever leaves the Apple ecosystem (like ObjC). In that domain, Rust will never "win." I think that Rust is an awesome server language, though, and I'm glad to see it gain traction. I just hope that it doesn't get trashed by a bunch of junk dependencies, written in it. I find using apps written, using hybrid systems, or PWAs, to be quite painful (on Apple devices -and that…

I think whoever „wins“, it would be necessary to have good interop at least. Currently, Rust devs are integrating core libs into native iOS apps by going the C route. All this work to make everything memory safe, and then this.

Swift-based interop would provide richer type information. See how swift-bridge takes advantage of it:

https://github.com/chinedufn/swift-bridge

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

#263

Post by iamcreasy »

hnfong wrote: post #250
meitham wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the wrong assumption! I have read the article before I asked, and still have no idea what it is! Saying it provides these abstraction NSObject, NSString, NSArray tells me nothing! The article is clearly written towards readers familiar with Apple ecosystem.

The Foundation framework is basically the standard library of Objective C (and thus pretty much the standard library for most of the Apple ecosystem as well).

What is the Linux equivalent to Foundation Framework?

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

#264

Post by jurip »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #221
howinteresting wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift would never have won, and will never win, while it's so closely associated with Apple. Many people in positions of power believe (correctly) that Apple will always put its own needs above everyone else's. Those are the people who have chosen Rust.

Swift will never win against Rust for a much simpler reason: performance. Invariably, rust is chosen where performance is critical, and Swift’s reference counting GC ensures it will never compete with Rust in those scenarios.

Rust is pretty often chosen also in places where performance is not that critical. It has a good ecosystem, a good type system, native builds and great performace. Those factors make it a good choice in places where you'd be just fine even if it was slightly slower. If Swift loses by a small margin — and Swift is a high performance language too — it could very well edge out Rust with ergonomics.

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

#265

Post by jupp0r »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #221
howinteresting wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift would never have won, and will never win, while it's so closely associated with Apple. Many people in positions of power believe (correctly) that Apple will always put its own needs above everyone else's. Those are the people who have chosen Rust.

Swift will never win against Rust for a much simpler reason: performance. Invariably, rust is chosen where performance is critical, and Swift’s reference counting GC ensures it will never compete with Rust in those scenarios.

You don't need ultra performant memory management for most of your code. Swift compiles to machine code and ARC is fine for most use cases and you can use unsafe raw pointers etc for your occasional hot code path where you want to optimize memory management.

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

#266

Post by meitham »

herodotus wrote: post #223
meitham wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the wrong assumption! I have read the article before I asked, and still have no idea what it is! Saying it provides these abstraction NSObject, NSString, NSArray tells me nothing! The article is clearly written towards readers familiar with Apple ecosystem.

Objective-C is an object-oriented programming language that is essentially a super-set of C. In fact the earliest implementation of Objective C, if I recall correctly, translated Objective-C code to C. The only built in types in Objective-C are the C types, like int, char and so on. The "Foundation" is a set of classes that implement many useful types that all inherit from a superclass called NSObject. The "NS" prefi…

Yes absolutely, thank you very much!

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

#267

Post by jurip »

Faark wrote: post #167
smoldesu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Xcode has its flaws but mostly it's pretty great to work in. With it available for the vast majority of current Swift programmers, it's a hard market to break into.

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

#268

Post by wbl »

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…

If it was just a matter of avoiding memory safety Java and ML were right there, and these languages are pretty different from each other.

It's not just memory safety. Go gets motivated by highly concurrent systems with large numbers of programmers and prioritized simplicity and developer experience. Rust was aiming at very high performance at the extended of complexity and compile times, and Swift wanted to build UI hierarchies.

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

#270

Post by dangus »

xp84 wrote: post #260

When the product of this hits the OS I predict massive instability. I don't think the Apple of 2022 has the level of systems programming talent that was behind the 1990s code in the core foundation. Today I feel like most of their attempts to move the OS forward beyond the shiny UI gimmicks (Tired of Exposé™? Try Stage Manager!™) are sloppy and only barely work (like "discoveryd" - google that if you don't remember).…

This is just plain cynicism and dramatization. “Massive instability” lol as if anyone with a desktop OS of any sort in 2023 has had anything close to that kind of experience. Let me know when my scroll bar UI is lagging like it’s 2003 in Cupertino.

I’m sure Jaguar had zero errors and had all the code audited by Steve Jobs himself to make sure it had top quality.

And for real what indicator is there that Apple has low-talent employees? Do they not pay well with good benefits? Where exactly do you expect all the good systems programmers are working?

I don’t think a company with bad low level engineers would be bragging about wake from sleep times in their marketing materials.

I don’t know of any other desktop OSes that replaced their entire file system with a routine OTA update transparent to the user.

I can think of other big recent changes like how people criticized the new System Settings panel a bunch, but at least Apple didn’t take 10 years of iterative updates to not even finish the transition. Please, someone tell me why Windows 11 still has the old Control Panel when Apple replaced their entire settings panel in a single update.

As stupid as it is, in my mind the simple fact that iOS just added a “copy and delete” button to the screenshot capture UI tells me that there are still plenty of power user geeks at Apple. We shouldn’t be surprised that they happen to care about different things than what we cared about in the 90s.

We can nitpick the bugs all day but I can’t think of another desktop OS that executes on its goals as consistently as macOS, commercial or not.

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