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Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

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Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#81

Post by philwelch »

blululu wrote: post #79
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.

I thought Kotlin was pretty widely used as a Java alternative on the backend

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#83

Post by [deleted] »

w10-1 wrote: post #67

The project to rewrite Foundation in Swift is many years old, and had been stalled. New in 2023 is instead NOT to match all of Foundation, but to make some core libraries that make Swift usable on many platforms. E.g., they broke out the very large internationalization/i18n tables required for unicode support into a separate module. It's very unlikely Apple would move off their own Foundation, which is well-understoo…

[deleted]

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#84

Post by GeekyBear »

kibwen wrote: post #38
DrBenCarson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad take. Swift heavily relies on LLVM. As long as you have LLVM IR, your support isn’t going anywhere. Not to mention Apple continues to be an outsized contributor to LLVM and clang (largely because they started and open sourced the projects)

Apple funds LLVM, but it didn't start LLVM. "The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a perm…

Apple hired Chris Lattner straight out of college. LLVM was the subject of his Masters Thesis.

It existed, but certainly wasn't yet ready for prime time. You can watch Chris give a Tech Talk at Google introducing Clang and LLVM and going over the features added in LLVM 2.0 while he was at Apple.

He joined Apple in 2005. and this talk was in 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRaLPupGks

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#85

Post by irrational »

baby wrote: post #75
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.

Is there a way they could have known that?

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#86

Post by zarzavat »

djha-skin wrote: post #78
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

What would you use instead of ref counting? Swift is an embedded language for Apple’s own chips, they can optimize the hell out of refcounting at silicon level.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#87

Post by fnord77 »

philwelch wrote: post #81
blululu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought Kotlin was pretty widely used as a Java alternative on the backend

Kotlin seems kinds of pointless with the features in newer Java versions

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#88

Post by chii »

blululu wrote: post #79
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.

> this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android.

i think kotlin has more use outside compared to swift.

But a language has to start somewhere, so i wouldn't hold it against swift. It's a fairly well done language regardless, and nothing apple specific about it tbh (which are all just libraries).

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#89

Post by rahmeero »

philwelch wrote: post #81
blululu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought Kotlin was pretty widely used as a Java alternative on the backend

An example is smart contracts on the Corda blockchain, which is programmed in Kotlin. It may be me, but I have seen more Kotlin outside of Android than on it.
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