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Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

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Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#71

Post by w10-1 »

nequo wrote: post #61
lyu07282 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they just had a proper cross platform standard library and package manager it might be more successful, it is a pretty cool language. But the north Korean esque closed apple ecosystem makes that impossible, all of that is intentional.

Why is it not better for Apple to make Swift truly cross-platform? Is it just that the maintenance cost is not worth it? Or would it threaten its ecosystem in a way that I don't understand? It would seem that making Swift cross-platform would make Apple's ecosystem more accessible to developers. The barrier to entry would be lower if developers only needed to learn the APIs and not a whole new language and its toolin…

The Swift compiler and standard library are pretty tightly linked. The Swift type system is getting pretty complicated already, handling a whole range of lifetimes, async, the combination of protocols, generics, existentials, etc. with some magic handling for arrays and maps in the library. So the cost of cross-platform effort would be significant.

The greatest barrier to entry is XCode. It's archaic, impossible to extend, and has a very wide surface that would overwhelm any development team.

(Java works fine on macOS, but developers want to deploy to iOS.)

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#72

Post by GeekyBear »

kevingadd wrote: post #65
GeekyBear wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. It's like Rust in that it offers memory safety by default without a big performance hit.

From what I've seen the ref counting can cause a big performance hit. Maybe this has improved in the last couple years?

> From what I've seen the ref counting can cause a big performance hit.

Apple has been writing OS components in Swift for a while now. It certainly doesn't seem to be producing the performance issues we saw when Google attempted to write components for Fuchsia in Go or Microsoft's effort to create new features for Longhorn in .NET.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#73

Post by GeekyBear »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #70
GeekyBear wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. It's like Rust in that it offers memory safety by default without a big performance hit.

I think many also find its syntax more approachable compared to that of Rust. It's got a lot of bells and whistles, but newcomers don't have to use them right away and can pick up more advanced bits as they become comfortable with doing so.

> I think many also find its syntax more approachable compared to that of Rust.

Chris Lattner (of LLVM fame) did design the language with the goal of hiding complexity until it is needed.

> The concept of progressive disclosure in Swift, where you can start with something very simple and then learn complexity as you go, was totally driven by making it teachable. I personally spent a lot of time trying to make sure that the introduction to Swift could just be print("Hello World"). No semicolons, no \ns, none of that public static void main stuff. Making it simple and approachable was a strong goal, and not in a weird way where in a teaching environment there is this “Swift Prime” language that’s similar but different.

https://oleb.net/blog/2017/06/chris-lattner-wwdc-swift-panel...

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#74

Post by blululu »

brink wrote: post #53
thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

Seems a lot of people feel the way you do. I had to make something using swift once, and could barely find a community to help me decipher the cryptic swift documentation centered around their coreml library. Apple is keeping Swift on life support, imo.

CoreML is a bit of an exceptional challenge beyond just Swift. Admittedly it could really use a lot more documentation from Apple, but it would be unfair to judge swift based on an uncommon and under documentated library (I suspect that it would get a lot more use if it were not so hard to set up).

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#75

Post by baby »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

If they had waited a little bit Rust would have been a great option. That's a shame.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#77

Post by ksec »

Not a popular opinion.

Current Apple and Swift felt somewhat like Apple and Dylan in the 90s.

May be time could tell. A lot of people hate Objective-C, and was cheering for Swift in 2014. Now nearly a decade later, it seems time and resources could have been spent somewhere else.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#78

Post by djha-skin »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

There's not even anything technically interesting about the language. Reference counting? Really? We have so much more than that and you just went with reference counting. Ugh

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#79

Post by blululu »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

Totally valid point that swift is only useful for developing for Apple products, but this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android. If you are dealing with iOS it is a joy compared to objective C. I would also add that it is a really nice language in general that is modern, expressive and general ergonomic.
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