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Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

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Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#11

Post by jwlake »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #7
politician wrote: post #3

[flagged]

[flagged]

I mean a realistic version of that comment is that you can use GTP* to make a set of unit tests. Then iteratively write a new version in swift to be bug compliant with the old version using GPT*. Then profit? The question really is why is swift objc bridge so bad you need this software?

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#12

Post by zainhoda »

Long overdue -- there's a very noticeable difference in runtime errors with Swift libraries vs the rest. This is especially true of AVFoundation, which is an absolute mess of hidden and undocumented state. Swift optionals and enums will go a long way to fixing that.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#14

Post by cwp »

cutler wrote: post #2

Considering Swift 1.0 was released in September 2014 I'm not exactly bowled over by how long it's taken Apple, with all their resources, to rewrite Foundation.

Actually, Apple delayed stabilizing the ABI (which would be required for rewriting low-level libraries) in order to work on other features that the community (ie, non-Apple users of Swift) needed more. If Apple had prioritized the needs of their own developers, this would have been done years ago. So kudos to Apple.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#15

Post by stephc_int13 »

Well, this is one more step toward a fully Swift-only platform.

Very soon it will not be possible to publish an app on iOS not built with the house language.

For those who don’t know, using C/C++ and opengl was easily done on iOS for many years, as llvm/clang was the official compiler.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#17

Post by raincole »

cutler wrote: post #2

Considering Swift 1.0 was released in September 2014 I'm not exactly bowled over by how long it's taken Apple, with all their resources, to rewrite Foundation.

I'd prefer this approach, rather than hastily rewriting a stable codebase in the coolest trendy language.

9 years is not that long for a programming language. PG's (in)famous eassy on Python Paradox [1] was written in 2004. By the time Python was 13 years old and it was still a "cool kid's language".

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#18

Post by plagiarist »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #15

Well, this is one more step toward a fully Swift-only platform. Very soon it will not be possible to publish an app on iOS not built with the house language. For those who don’t know, using C/C++ and opengl was easily done on iOS for many years, as llvm/clang was the official compiler.

You're going to be relieved when you find out Swift has been using LLVM this entire time.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#19

Post by KerrAvon »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #5
cutler wrote: post #2

Considering Swift 1.0 was released in September 2014 I'm not exactly bowled over by how long it's taken Apple, with all their resources, to rewrite Foundation.

It's how they've always done things. It was about 10 years after the last 68k Mac shipped before the entire classic OS was power. Same with moving everything from carbon to cocoa.

(Mac OS 8/9 was never fully PowerPC native.)
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